Hillary relents, will turn over homebrew e-mail server to DOJ

Most people involved with a criminal investigation would have little choice but to simply turn over information requested by the Justice Department. It's not like you could drag your feet, make counterdemands, claim publicly to have cooperated when in fact you had done no such thing . . . who do you think you are? A Clinton? You know the heat is getting serious when a Clinton actually does turn over information requested by investigators, although the mere fact that this happened makes you wonder what we're not being told. Last night Hillary's team announced that she will, in fact, turn over both her homebrew e-mail server and an associated thumb drive - this, of course, after months of refusing to do so and claiming she had already turned over everything they needed. (Which really meant everything she wanted to turn over.)

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This happened after an inspector general determined that the server contains at least five e-mails with classified information on them. So does that mean Hillary's toast? I'm not so sure, because it's not at all clear to me that the DOJ is going full bore in this investigation. If Hillary's people are to be believed, this is more about protecting the classified information than about proving Hillary broke the law:

A senior Clinton campaign aide said the server hadn't yet changed hands as of Tuesday evening and Clinton's team is working with the Justice Department to arrange the logistics of the handover. The thumb drive, meanwhile, has been turned over. And Kendall, the aide said, has followed State Department guidance on safekeeping. Clinton's campaign believes there are no emails from her State Department tenure on the server, since it was wiped clean after she turned over her work-related emails to the State Department, the aide said. The aide said it's the Clinton campaign's understanding that the Justice Department isn't looking to reconstruct the server's history, but is instead concerned about the security of the emails today, since some are now classified though they weren't classified or labeled as such at the time.

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That last line is Hillary's current preferred talking point: Hey, if she e-mailed any classified information, it must have been classified after she e-mailed it! That's absurd on its face. Someone who served as Secretary of State for four years and used this private server exclusively for all her business e-mail can't possibly have neither sent nor received a single e-mail containing classified information. And as Rob pointed out yesterday, whatever was wiped from the server is probably still in the possession of Chinese hackers. If the Justice Department wants to get at the truth about Hillary's lawbreaking, their acquisition of her server might afford them the opportunity to do so. But my sense of it is that it will probably become necessary at some point for Trey Gowdy to demand and possibly even subpoena the contents of the server from the DOJ, since they're going to be more interested in sitting on it than in exposing what's really on it. And even then, what are they going to find? Hillary is no IT genius, obviously, but I'd still be very surprised if they turned over the server without first being very confident it contained no evidence she broke the law concerning the exposure of classified information, and no evidence that contradicts her story on Benghazi. If the server has really been wiped to the point where you can't reconstruct its history, then what is the value of having turned it over? And if the DOJ isn't going to try to reconstruct its history, then how can it be said to be doing any sort of serious criminal investigation? It makes you wonder: Did Hillary give the server to Justice so they could prevent Gowdy from getting his hands on it? And can they?

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