Republicans’ insistence that the probes into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails will reveal illegal activity has reduced the chances that this episode will bring about real reform. PHOTOGRAPH BY BROOKS KRAFT LLC / CORBIS VIA GETTY

On Wednesday, the conservative group Judicial Watch released two hundred and ninety-six pages of e-mails that Hillary Clinton and her aides at the State Department had exchanged. Judicial Watch’s president has said that they came from the e-mail account of Huma Abedin, who was then Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. In these e-mails, Abedin is forever chasing down her colleagues, across different floors of hotels. “Where r u?” she writes to the policy aide Jake Sullivan. “Where r u?” she asks the State Department official Paul Narain. “Meet you at Hyatt,” she tells the President’s body man, Reggie Love. You sense a swarm of prominent people circling Abedin, hoping to win a quarter-hour of her time or a minute of her boss’s: the diplomat Richard Holbrooke, the banker Stephen Roach, the cyclist Lance Armstrong. Abedin’s own attention is on the other young staffers who have daily contact with Clinton—on the need to clarify, confer, meet up. Sullivan is in the lobby or “gallivanting”; Narain is at the ballroom; Philippe Reines is in his hotel room; Sarah Farnsworth is at the lobby bar. These tiny social centers of power regulate the far-larger one, Clinton herself. To those outside it, even just outside it, the circle around the Secretary of State can seem impenetrable. “I hope that one of you can get this to the Secretary—I’ve sent it to everyone else,” Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote to Abedin and Sullivan, in April, 2009, appealing to them to forward a document. At the time, Slaughter was Clinton's director of policy planning.

In each of the Clinton e-mail releases, the question has been whether improper influence filtered through this circle, in particular from the Clinton Foundation. In this week’s batch, the headlines came from an exchange between Abedin and Doug Band, a longtime aide to Bill Clinton, who was trying to get a Nigerian billionaire of Lebanese descent named Gilbert Chagoury, a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, access to the State Department. “We need Gilbert chagoury to speak to the substance person re lebanon,” Band wrote to Abedin. “As you know, he’s key guy there and to us and is loved in lebanon. Very imp.” Abedin replied that the right person was a Lebanon policy expert named Jeffrey Feltman and said, “I’ll talk to Jeff.” The exchange might have ended here, but Band wrote back. “Better if you call him,” he said. “Now preferable. This is very important. He’s awake I’m sure.” Celebrities and power brokers genuflected to Abedin, but Band was sure he could lean on her. The most interesting words Band deployed were the simplest ones: “we” and “us.” In a sense, they contained the essence of the many Clinton e-mail investigations: Whom did the Secretary of State’s senior staff understand to be within the bounds of that “we”?

But when news organizations tracked down Feltman there was a delicious turn. The State Department’s Lebanon expert had never heard about Chagoury from Abedin or anyone else. “I was not aware of the proposal that he speak to me until this email exchange was released, but in any case we never spoke,” he told CNN. Band, in trying to take advantage of the social dynamics around the Secretary of State, had misunderstood their nature, and had promised access he couldn’t give. He thought he was the heavy, and Abedin the functionary, but maybe it was the other way around.

In the e-mails around Clinton, there is a constant, low-amplitude, transactional scurry: of older people for an audience, and of younger people for a position. “Was just thinking about you and trying to see where things were with your situation?” Abedin writes to a young prospect. She promises Band that she will call someone who expected to but did not get an ambassadorship. A young volunteer from the Clinton Foundation’s efforts in Haiti is interested in a position with the State Department, and a résumé and application are passed along. Clinton herself, as she appears in the e-mails, seems far from this action, sweating the policy details. “Pls print,” she is always asking her staffers, when they send her lengthy memos. The promised scandals have failed to materialize; there has been no evidence so far of a quid pro quo, just an environment that includes entitled multimillionaires and pushy Doug Band.

Washington right now is in a period of enforced transparency, with Edward Snowden; WikiLeaks; Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee; and the alleged Russian operative, or operatives, Guccifer 2.0. What they have revealed is not some new hidden system of levers beneath the capital but, rather, the same old system that we’ve more or less tolerated all along. Access to governmental power depends too much on personal relationships; rich friends of politicians have too easy a time gaining an audience. “The scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal,” the journalist Michael Kinsley famously said, during the George H. W. Bush Administration, and for a long time that was regarded as a truth about Washington. As a matter of ethics, it still holds; as a matter of politics, it seems outdated.

The many different anti-Clinton camps, on the left and on the right, share an assumption that all of the Clintons’ decisions are oriented around off-the-books agendas, and that these agendas emerge in moments of stress. This has amped up the fervor of the various probes into Clinton’s e-mail and the Benghazi episode—by means of FOIA, subpoena, and Russian hack—and it has also created a wild hype. In June, Julian Assange told ITV that WikiLeaks had the goods on Clinton, and that its material “could proceed to an indictment.” Republicans have spent years promoting the idea that at the heart of the Benghazi episode lies a profound criminality, self-interest, and corruption. The insistence that the probes will reveal illegal activity has crowded out the more realistic possibility that the relationships around Clinton are simply unsavory—and this, in turn, has reduced the chances that this episode will end with efforts at reform. “Lock her up!” Donald Trump’s crowds cry, but each time they do it seems more ridiculous. We have seen so many of her e-mails. Lock her up for what?