Often, when I mention Hillary’s emails to people who work in the Defense Department or the Intelligence Community, they say something like, “If I did a fraction of what Hillary did, I’d be in jail.”

“What Hillary did” was steal 66,000 documents from the State Department. She diverted emails to a server in her basement, a server to which hostile foreign intelligence services had easy access. Roughly half the emails were deleted, with some of the deletions occurring—”accidentally,” of course—after the emails had been subpoenaed by Congress.

Then-FBI Director James Comey let Clinton off the hook because, he said later, she lacked “evil intent.” In making that judgment, Comey apparently failed to consider that spoliation of evidence—“the intentional, reckless, or negligent withholding, hiding, altering, fabricating, or destroying of evidence relevant to a legal proceeding”—is a modus operandi of the Clintons and their associates, and has been for four decades.

In 1978, Bill Clinton was about to become governor of Arkansas. To funnel payoffs to the Clintons, Tyson Foods, the state’s biggest polluter, created a fake commodities account. Hillary would “invest” $1,000 and make a profit of nearly $100,000 (almost $400,000 in today’s money). To set up the account, Tyson used Refco, a commodities brokerage firm whose founder had been convicted of selling spoiled chickens to the military, using fake time-and-date stamps.

How did Refco cover up the payoffs to the Clintons? By using fake time-and-date stamps. Two Refco brokers in Arkansas testified under oath about how they covered up suspicious trades, with one explaining: “We locked the doors . . . [The supervisor said] ‘We’ve got to go back and individually time and date stamp all these [orders for cattle]’ . . . And we sat down and changed our clocks back and the dates back . . . ” The back-stamped records covered the day of Hillary’s most profitable fake trade. It was one of three days for which daily trading statements later went missing.

To avoid taxes on her fake commodities profits, Hillary turned to a political operative named Jim McDougal, who got the Clintons into a real estate scam known as Whitewater. Fifteen people, including Bill’s successor as governor, were convicted of Whitewater-related crimes. The Clintons’ records were subpoenaed—and vanished. Two years later, just two days outside the statute of limitations, the records materialized in the White House residence.

In “Filegate,” hundreds of FBI files on Republicans were somehow transported from the Bureau’s offices, to be found in the White House. “It appears to have been a completely honest bureaucratic SNAFU,” President Clinton explained.

In 2004, Sandy Berger, who had been Clinton’s national security advisor, was set to testify about the lead up to the 9/11 attacks. Berger went to the National Archives, stuffed documents in his socks and pants, and, after exiting the building, hid the stolen documents under a construction trailer, retrieving them later. We still don’t know what he took.

In the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton was not the only official who made documents disappear.

Remember Lois Lerner, who ran the IRS effort to stop the Tea Party movement? Her laptop crashed. With perhaps 24,000 emails gone, the IRS didn’t look at the two sources of backup tapes, or the server hard drives, or the loaner laptops from which some emails were eventually recovered. The IRS “Media Management Midnight Unit” magnetically “degaussed” 422 backup tapes, despite an agency-wide preservation order and congressional subpoena.

One EPA regional administrator was forced to resign after being caught conducting government business through an email account with an environmentalist group; another apparently used a fake email account. Lisa Jackson, the agency’s top official, used the account of “Richard Windsor,” named after her dog and her hometown. Windsor, despite never existing, was awarded six EPA certifications in cyber-security and ethics.

Jackson’s successor, Gina McCarthy, simply deleted every one of thousands of text messages she sent on her EPA phone, claiming they were all personal. That includes the ones she could be seen sending while seated at congressional hearings.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch used, for her fake email account, the name of her grandmother. Her predecessor, Eric Holder, used “Lew Alcindor,” the birth name of NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

It seems that word went out to everyone in the Obama Administration, that you don’t have to follow the law requiring that messages be preserved. Consider this exchange between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, FBI agents who were having an affair and texting each other frequently.

Page: Have a meeting with turgal [James Turgal, executive assistant director for the FBI Information and Technology Branch] about getting iphone in a day or so Strzok: Oh hot damn. I’m happy to pilot that…we get around our security/monitoring issues? Page: No, he’s [Turgal’s] proposing that we just stop following them. Apparently the requirement to capture texts came from omb [the Office of Management and Budget], but we’re the only org (I’m told) who is following that rule. His point is, if no one else is doing it why should we. . . I’m told—thought I have seen—that there is an IG report that says everyone is failing. But one [sic: no one] has changed anything, so why not just join in the failure.

“Just join in the failure.” Just ignore the law, like everyone else does. No wonder Hillary figured she’d get away with it.