The real shame of Hillary's email shenanigans

The ugly reality of America in 2016 is that laws are for the little people.

The facts of Hillary Clinton's email scandal are clear. She routed most of her email as secretary of state through a personal server. This disregarded State Department security procedures. It was almost certainly done for political purposes, to get around government record-keeping laws. Because her private email server was woefully unsecure (for several months, her emails weren't even encrypted), the emails of the secretary of state of the United States almost certainly ended up in the hands of foreign powers like Russia and China.

What's more, her response to this unfolding scandal has been the familiar Clinton pattern of shameless lying and obfuscating. She emphatically stated that she did not send or receive classified information from her personal email account. We know that's not true.

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In a healthy democracy, this should destroy anybody's political career. Anybody at the State Department, or the Defense Department, or any other sensitive body who had been so reckless with security procedures would have been fired and prosecuted if their last name hadn't been Clinton. In countless regulated industries, if any senior executive had been so careless with record-keeping laws, they would've been indicted faster than you can say "ambitious young DA sends press release." There's just no question that politics played a role in not indicting Hillary.

You may be tempted to do a slight dance here. Yes, sure, what Clinton did was "technically" illegal, but was it really so bad? It's a fair enough question. In a world where everybody commits three felonies a day, probably every senior government official broke regulations once or twice. As the Clinton camp pointed out, her predecessors at Foggy Bottom also used personal email accounts and on occasion did government business through them (though nowhere to the extent that she did). Yes, government classification rules have gone amok, so that Christmas greetings now count as classified (though Clinton also sent through genuinely classified information).

But this is precisely the point. In a world where everyone is a felon, it's not the law that decides who gets prosecuted, but people. Prosecuting is a subjective choice. And those decisions will inevitably end up being political.

FBI Director James Comey argued that "no reasonable prosecutor" would bring charges against Clinton. But when that same Comey was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he brought a bunch of three-felonies-a-day prosecutions against Wall Street bankers. Well, Wall Street bankers are unpopular. "Taking on Wall Street" is good for a prosecutor's career.

The same isn't true for a career government official who indicts the presumptive presidential nominee of a major political party.

It's almost as if the American governmental class has made a concerted effort to vindicate Donald Trump's critique of American society, split between self-dealing cosmopolitan insiders and the great mass of outsiders.

What matters isn't whether what Clinton did is legal or not (though it's not). It's that in a healthy political system, politicians are held accountable way before it gets to that.

Bring your gaze over to Britain. After the political slap in the face that was the Brexit referendum, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron resigned, even though he was under no constitutional or legal obligation to and, indeed, there was no coup against him in the offing. So did Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, who concluded that after he'd done his job of winning this referendum, he should step back. The entire country is aghast at the fact that the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn isn't resigning despite being disavowed by his entire team.

Britain's parliamentary politics combined with the aristocratic ethic of honor led to the cultural institutionalization of the single most important tradition for any political system to function properly: accountability.

Nevermind the legal technicalities. Hillary Clinton screwed up. She screwed up big time. She screwed up because she put her own personal interest above the country's interest. She then lied through her teeth about it.

That should be enough.

Perhaps my favorite political story of the 20th century involves a little-known British minister in the 1960s named John Profumo. As a secretary of state for war, Profumo had a brief affair with a young model and call girl. It turned out that the girl had also been linked to a Soviet attaché. Profumo initially lied to the House about the affair. Even though there was absolutely no indication that Profumo had ever given the girl classified information, or indeed that she was a Soviet plant, Profumo immediately resigned and left politics forever.

But it's what happened later that really sets an example. Profumo began volunteering for a charity in London's East End — cleaning toilets, although he was eventually persuaded to use his contacts to work as a fundraiser for charities. As the writer Peter Hitchens put it, Profumo "vanished into London's East End for 40 years, doing quiet good works and keeping his mouth shut".

Where are our Profumos? Marco Rubio said he wouldn't run for the Senate again and now he's running. David Petraeus works for a private equity firm. And the anti-Profumo is our likely next president.