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These revelations and so many more came from the FBI director himself. They tell the story of how careful and thorough the Clinton team were in making sure these emails will never flash on a iPad screen or an office computer again. While Clinton was found to be “extremely careless” in her handling of State Department emails, she was simultaneously — and paradoxically — found not to be “grossly negligent.”

She was, however, diligent, composed, thorough and utterly efficient in the way she disposed of the messages she never wanted to see the light of day. America essentially had two secretaries of state: one who was “extremely careless” in her handling of “work-related emails;” the other who toiled with robot efficiency and punctilious concern that the emails she did not want seen — the recipes, the right fibres in a good yoga mat, Chelsea beaming at her hedge-fund Romeo, notes to the Clinton Foundation — would never be exposed.

Comey delivered a devastating account of Clinton’s propensity to hit the delete key and her use of a vulnerable email server, but after all the wind-up, to the astonishment of the world, and at some cost one might presume to his own intellectual and moral coherence, concluded she should not be prosecuted … because she was not — all his descriptions to the contrary — “grossly negligent.”

And this came but two days after Bill Clinton met U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch on a private plane at the Phoenix airport for 30 minutes, supposedly to chat about his grandchildren and his golf game. The meeting perpetuates the impression that there is one system of justice for the Washington elite, and another for everyone else. People know that Hillary Clinton got a pass because … well, because she’s Hillary Clinton. They know that if a plebeian did even a fraction of what Clinton did, he or she would be eating bread and water in a cubbyhole cell.