Where Hillary's email explanation breaks down

Most of us have two email accounts. I have a gmail account for personal correspondence and a work account for work-related correspondence. I am forced by my company to use my work account for work-related emails. One way in which I am forced is by the simple fact that, if I use my personal account to send an email within the company, our spam filter may filter it out.

One thing I know, however: anything I send through my work account is permanently preserved and subject to discovery. And that is as it should be. Legal actions between entities (businesses, governmental agencies, and so on) would never be able to proceed unless those entities were forced to preserve clear records reflecting what was going on within those entities at various times.

The problem with Hillary's single, not-controlled-by-the-State-Department, email account, on the other hand, is that it allowed her to go through her emails after the fact and delete any emails that in retrospect she judged to be embarrassing, thereby making later discovery impossible.

For example, imagine if Hillary fired off a large number of emails on the night of the Benghazi attack. At the time she sent them, they may have appeared innocuous enough and they were definitely related to her official capacity, so, if she had had two accounts, she might have sent them out through her government account. The fact that she did not make use of two accounts and instead used a single email account under her sole control means that she had the opportunity with the aid of hindsight to go through all her emails and decide in retrospect whether there were particular emails that she found embarrassing and wanted to delete, thereby expunging them from public view.

This is like a CEO involved in a legal proceeding being allowed after the fact to go through the exhibits of evidence and decide which pieces he wanted filtered out. Alternatively, imagine if you had sole control over the records of your stock trades for the year. At the end of the year, you would be able to go back and decide which transactions you wanted to report and which you didn't. Nice gig if you can get it.

Hillary's argument that, even if she had used two email accounts, she still never would have been careless enough to send embarrassing emails through her government account is like a suspected house burglar telling the police not to bother dusting the place because he never would have been careless enough to leave behind fingerprints. It happens all the time that people inadvertently leave behind a paper (or, in our day and age, electronic) trail that in retrospect they wished they hadn’t. That's the whole reason why all of us are forced to leave behind these evidentiary trails in the first place. The fact that the Secretary of State through her use of a private email account for the transaction of public business was given the privilege of going back and, in essence, editing her evidentiary trail is an outrage.