Hillary wasn't just using private email. She was running an entire private email server out of her home

As Dan reported yesterday, Hillary Clinton has been exposed for using private email accounts to conduct federal business during her accomplishment-free tenure as Secretary of State. While it's not terribly unusual for federal officials to do this occasionally, Hillary did it exclusively. ALL of her business was conducted from her own, special, above-the-law account. ...And that's just the beginning.

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According to the White House,none of this is a big deal - as long as the State Department received complete backups of those communications. Of course, that's completely ridiculous, because we're talking about the Clintons. Is anyone, anywhere, stupid enough to believe that Hillary would turn over un-scrubbed archives of her correspondence? Are we really supposed to think that - of all people - the Clintons would abide by "the honor system" and not spend two years deleting anything that might make Hillary look bad? This gets even worse when you learn that Hillary wasn't simply using her own email address. She was using her own set of "homebrew" email servers which the Clintons maintain in their Chappaqua, New York home. As the AP Reports

The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton's emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family's home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press. The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton's secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications. Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work. In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands. It was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton ran that computer system.

Remember when Lois Lerner said her hard drives had been destroyed and, therefore, all of her email had been lost? The immediate response was "All the email should still exist on the servers." Hillary, it seems, didn't want to have to deal with that little snafu. If she controls the servers, she can control what's kept, what's deleted, what's archived, and precisely which backups are turned over to the State Department. By running her own server, Hillary granted herself near-complete control over the record of her official State Department interactions. Hillary's people are arguing that, since she was emailing other federal officials, records of those interactions would still exist at the recipients end. ...And they're right, if the people receiving her messages chose to follow the rules and were using their federal accounts. Unfortunately, Gawker reports that there's a big hole in Hillary's story. At least two of her top staffers were also using the private Clinton system.

Hillary Clinton is defending her use of a private email address, hosted at ClintonEmail .com, to conduct official State Department business by claiming that her emails were captured by official @state.gov accounts that other agency employees were instructed to use to contact her. But according to a knowledgeable source, at least two other top Clinton aides also used private email accounts to conduct government business—placing their official communications outside the scope of federal record-keeping regulations. “Her top staffers used those Clinton email addresses” at the agency, said the source, who has worked with Clinton in the past. The source named two staffers in particular, Philippe Reines and Huma Abedin, who are said to have used private email addresses in the course of their agency duties. Reines served as deputy assistant secretary of state, and Abedin as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. Both rank among Clinton’s most loyal confidantes, in and out of the State Department.

So, at the very least, those closest to Hillary - those who were most likely to be discussing her secrets - have been operating under the same umbrella of protection that she created for herself. There's no way to know what they were talking about and, thanks to the delete key, it's entirely possible that there never will be. So much for transparency. Given that other federal officials had to see Hillary's private Clinton address in the header, but did nothing to rein her in, why should we assume that the "private server" practice isn't common? Either the State Department didn't care about the transgression, or they just "got it." To be blunt, it feels like a culture of secrecy has developed among top-level officials, and the use of clandestine accounts is so pervasive that they all write it off as "no big deal." ....At least until one of them gets caught. As always, we're "shocked" to find that the not-at-all-sleazy-and-corrupt Clintons are embroiled in an ethics controversy.