Thursday’s report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation by Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz was, as Canadian pop-punk degenerates Sum 41 might have put it, “All killer, no filler.” There were so many jaw-dropping moments of, “No, wait — FBI employees can’t do that, can they?” that it transformed an actual government report into a veritable page-turner.

One of those minor gems, however, comes when you find out why the FBI didn’t investigate the Blackberries and other email devices of Hillary Clinton’s inner circle.

“We found that the FBI team and the prosecutors decided together to generally limit the devices they sought to those that either belonged to Clinton or were used to back-up or cull Clinton’s emails,” the report states on page 153.

“The team provided, among others, the following reasons for placing this limitation on the scope of the investigation: (1) the culture of mishandling classified information at the State Department which made the quantity of potential sources of evidence particularly vast; (2) the belief that Clinton’s own devices and the laptops used to cull her emails were the most likely places to find the complete collection of her emails from her tenure as Secretary of State; and (3) the belief that the State Department was the better entity to conduct a ‘spill investigation.’”

Now, leaving behind the part about “belief that the State Department was the better entity to conduct a ‘spill investigation’” (why is it that when it comes to the Obama administration and its tendrils, everyone assumes that there’s absolutely no conflict of interest in letting an entity investigate itself? Isn’t that why the Carter administration signed the legislation establishing the office of the inspector general in the first place?) the point that is highlighted should tell you everything you need to know about the Obama-era State Department — and, in particular, officials that hung around Hillary Clinton.

Tom Rogan at the Washington Examiner encapsulated it best: “Put another way, the agents thought that they might find so much classified information on unauthorized servers and systems that they would become lost in the maze. Horowitz, in what can only be described as a generous admonition, counters by noting ‘that (this excuse) fails to acknowledge that the team was not required to take an all-or-nothing approach. For example, a middle ground existed where those devices belonging to Clinton’s three top aides — which the team determined accounted for approximately 68 percent of Clinton’s email exchanges — would have been reviewed, but devices belonging to other State Department employees would not.’”

A culture of laxity at the State Department is hardly a surprise (I mean, what do you think started this whole mess?) but the tacit admission that they would simply find too many crimes on other devices ought to be a wake-up call of dramatic proportions. – READ MORE