Ruth Marcus is a columnist for The Washington Post. Email: ruthmarcus@washpost.com. Photo

This may sound strange coming from someone who doesn’t expect Hillary Clinton to be indicted and doesn’t think she should be, but I’ve been worrying about what will happen if she isn’t.

There is a school of people — a big school, judging from my email — for whom there are only two possibilities:

Either Clinton is charged with a crime for mishandling classified information on her private server — an outcome, this group thinks, that should be devastatingly obvious to anyone with half a brain. Or the Justice Department will squelch the indictment out of a politically motivated desire to protect the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

Heads, she’s indicted; tails, they’re corrupt. For this crowd, there is no outcome here that contemplates independent, sober-minded prosecutors looking at the facts and the law and reaching a contrary conclusion.

This attitude presents a problem, not so much for Clinton — she’ll be happy to accept the no-indictment outcome and the people who reject it will never be Clinton voters anyway — as for the criminal justice system. It bears some thinking at the top levels of the Justice Department and FBI about whether there is some way to mitigate the suspicion by making more information public than is the norm.