When they served as secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell each used private emails and between them 12 emails were sent to them or their staffers that contained classified information. This is merely an attempt to undermine the seriousness of Hillary Clinton’s actions when she kept and sent classified information on her homebrew server, in a deliberate attempt to avoid public information laws. Clinton did not even have an official State Department address. Some of the information was classified when she sent it, and the body of redacted information is much, much larger. Nevertheless, this news only gives ammunition to the Clinton campaign that she can escape this scandal unindicted. When asked during Thursday’s Democrat debate how confident she was that the FBI would not indict her because of her email use, Clinton responded, “I am 100 percent confident. This is a security review that was requested. It is being carried out. It will be resolved. But I have to add if there’s going to be a security review about me, there’s going to have to be security reviews about a lot of other people, including Republican office holders, because we’ve got this absurd situation of retroactive classifications.”

At least some of the information Powell sent was classified after it was sent. But as blogger Ed Morrissey notes, the secretary of state can declassify information originated by the State Department. Clinton, however, was sending information that she got from other agencies and had no business putting on her email server. But this nuance will be lost on most people.