Yes, they never should have been sent on a private system. And despite her deepening troubles, she continues to obfuscate and lie:

“We all have a responsibility to get this right, I have released 55,000 pages of emails, I have said repeatedly that I will answer questions in front of the House committee,” Clinton said at her address in New York, where she outlined a tax plan and endorsed New York’s move toward a $15 minimum wage.

“We are all accountable to the American people to get their facts right, and I will do my part, but I will also stay focused on the issues,” added Clinton, who let her frustration with the stories show.

Even ignoring the fact that (for no good reason whatsoever) she didn’t turn over the emails, but printed pages (making them difficult to search), whenever someone (and particularly a Democrat, and even more particularly a Clinton or a Clinton defender) tells you how many “thousands” of documents they’ve “turned over,” it is to deflect from the number of the documents that haven’t been turned over, and that in many cases have been deliberately destroyed. They think we’re stupid, and sadly, in many cases, too many are. And right on cue:

Democrats rallied to Clinton’s defense, characterizing the referral from the federal watchdogs as routine.

This would be hilarious if it weren’t so criminally corrupt, and this unqualified liar wasn’t still in a position to become president. Matt Welch (no Republican he) calls it like it is:

In sum, the Democratic Party’s 2016 presidential frontrunner brazenly violated government transparency policy, made a mockery of the Freedom of Information Act, placed her sensitive communications above the law, and then just lied about it, again and again. Now comes word that, unsurprisingly, two inspectors general are recommending that the Department of Justice open a criminal inquiry into the matter. One of their findings was that the private server, contrary to Clinton’s repeated claims, contained “hundreds of potentially classified emails.”*

So how much do Democrats value basic transparency, accountability, and honesty in their presidential candidates? Not bloody much, if you go by the handy polls over at RealClearPolitics. The six national polls taken this January and February, before the email scandal first broke, averaged out to a whopping 43 percentage-point lead for Hillary Clinton. How about the next six, in March and April? Plus 50. The 11 polls in May and June, when Berniementum first started sweeping the country, came in at +48, and the most recent five in July stand at +41.

Do Democrats have any aversion left to Nixonian non-transparency, which had been so anathema to them during the presidency of George W. Bush? Here’s a possible bellwether: Key Nixon-administration turncoat John W. Dean, who wrote a 2004 book entitled Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush, reacted to the latest Clinton story by tweeting “Leaking This Makes It Pure Politics,” and “GOP Behind False Charges In NYT. It’s gonna be a long 16 months.

They don’t care about honesty, they don’t care about transparency, they don’t care about integrity. They care about nothing but continuing their power over our lives. At some point, we will rebel, and it won’t be pretty for them, or for the country.

[Update a few minutes later]

Parsing Clinton: What is she hiding?

Clinton has put herself in a box. She can either hand the server over to an independent third party, who would protect her private email and our government’s working email. Or she can stonewall.

The latter course gives every voter the right—and every self-respecting journalist the responsibility—to ask, “What were you hiding, Hillary?”

What are you hiding?

While it’s nice to see that Ron Fournier has finally turned, the Republic continues to have a paucity of “self-respecting journalists.”

[Update a few minutes later]

Andrea Mitchell: “The media underestimated the impact of the Clinton email scandal.” No, as is pointed out, hacks like Andrea Mitchell overestimated their ability to make it go away by pretending it didn’t exist. As with the IRS scandal.