Hillary's email scandal will never go away

I think Bill Clinton makes a persuasive case that it was what he didn't do, rather than what did do, that contributed to the financial crisis. There aren't very compelling arguments out there that repealing the Glass-Steagall Act -- the law that separated commercial and investment banking -- contributed much to the crisis. Some, in fact, say it did the opposite, as it allowed commercial banks to help stabilize the system by buying investment banks, as happened when J.P. Morgan acquired Bear Stearns.

But avoiding the regulation of derivatives was a major error. And Clinton is pretty honest on that point. He thinks Republicans would have stopped him from actually doing anything about derivatives, but that doesn't absolve him of the responsibility for at least thinking he should do something about derivatives. He does, however, say that his team was pretty convinced derivatives would remain a niche market. And there's reason to believe him. I like posting this graph -- I posted it two days ago, in fact -- and it fits well here:



There was a massive acceleration in the size of the derivatives market between 2003 and 2008. You're looking at a 300 percent jump. Something, in other words, changed. Derivatives became more important to the financial system. But it happened after Clinton left office. Which makes it hard to say what he would have done if faced with the 2003 derivatives market as opposed to the 1997 derivatives market.

Clinton swears he was "queasy" about derivatives back in the '90s. Not queasy enough to do anything about them, but enough to bring them up with Alan Greenspan. If the derivatives market had been three or four times larger than it had been in 1997 -- and if it had gotten that way in a matter of years -- maybe Clinton would have gotten downright nauseous and decided something needed to be done. Or maybe not. It's hard to say. But it's not something that Clinton, or his critics, can prove or disprove. In the mid-to-late '90s, we were barely beginning to connect the dots on the tech bubble. The housing bubble was still a decade away.

Also: I find it sort of troubling that Clinton can't remember the name of, and Peter Baker doesn't seem familiar with the very existence of, Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that blew up in the late '90s. By this point in the financial crisis, hasn't everyone read -- or at least pretended to read -- Roger Lowenstein's When Genius Failed?

She.is.guilty. (Translation for Clinton fans: She exists in a state of having committed a crime.)

The timing of it is quite suspect,” said Vilsack, a former Iowa governor.

Steven Aftergood, who heads a project on government secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, said he thought the attention to Clinton’s emails was overblown, partly because similar classification disputes are common across government.

Still, he called Clinton’s public squabble with the intelligence community unusual.

“I think this is a unique set of circumstances in which a presidential candidate is engaged in a debate with an intelligence agency over her own record as a former official,” he said.

The State Department’s conclusion came as it has worked to process 55,000 pages of Clinton’s correspondence for public release, including about 1,000 pages that were released Friday night. Clinton has said that she deleted 31,000 additional emails in 2014, deeming them purely personal.

The State Department has been under a court order to release the documents in batches, once a month, as part of a lawsuit filed by reporter Jason Leopold of Vice News, who sued after the department failed to respond promptly to his request for the public documents.

A judge had ordered the department to release all of the emails by the end of January, but attorneys for the department said this week that they would miss the deadline, and requested another month.

That means the last of Clinton’s emails will not be released until the end of February — after the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary — and just before Super Tuesday, when voters in 11 states will cast ballots.

Where's the evidence of your claim?