Scandal? What Scandal?

On March 5, 2015, John Podesta, former White House chief of staff and longtime Clinton family confidant, received an email from his daughter. “I'm heading back to NY tonight. Any chance you're staying in nyc b/c of weather (or scandal)?" she asked. Podesta responded, "What scandal? A few e-mails that we've asked be made public?"

What makes this email remarkable, observes NationalReview's Jim Geraghty, is the date. It was three days after news had broken that Hillary Clinton improperly used a private email server during her time at the State Department and one day after Clinton had been served with a congressional subpoena for emails on that server. Podesta may have tried to spin his own daughter with his seeming insouciance, but about three weeks later, with the scandal of the private server rapidly metastasizing, Clinton's IT guy had his infamous "oh sh—" moment. He realized he had forgotten to wipe her server clean, as he had promised to do. He promptly used the computer program BleachBit to delete all the emails even though, as the FBI later concluded, "at the time he made the deletions in March 2015, he was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's e-mail data." (The FBI investigators, as it turned out, gave him immunity, but this sort of data-destruction-despite-a-subpoena is not something you should try at home.)

The reason we're privy to Podesta's cavalier attitude about Clinton's email scandal is that he now has email headaches of his own. Over a period of weeks, the shadowy WikiLeaks organization has been releasing hacked copies of Podesta's emails dating back years. WikiLeaks almost certainly has ties to Russian intelligence and is obviously up to no good. The requisite caveat lector thus applies. But so far, every email under scrutiny appears to be genuine.

And what a story they tell. America's greatest novelists could not have concocted a tale that so perfectly confirms dark suspicions about how the liberal elites running America really operate. Taken in total, the picture Podesta's emails present is of a man whose tentacles are adroitly moving all the levers of power. In retrospect, Podesta's casual attitude toward Clinton's email problems doesn't look oblivious—it looks prescient. Why should he worry about disgrace for Hillary Clinton when he and his friends in politics, business, and the media dictate what becomes a scandal?

In this respect, Podesta's emails help explain why the FBI ignored basic procedure, destroyed the computers of Clinton aides in "side agreements" to their immunity deals, and then refused to charge Clinton for egregious violations of laws governing classified information. On March 4 of last year—again, right after the Clinton email scandal broke—Podesta sent the following email to Clinton aide Cheryl Mills (who also received an immunity deal from the FBI): "Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That's the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but [it] seems like they will."