Pence’s email controversy is everything his critics could’ve hoped for

Hillary Clinton was clearly asking for trouble. She used a private email account to conduct official government business; she handled sensitive information over unsecured servers; and her system even became compromised during her time in office. No wonder Republicans were so hysterical about her reckless and negligent behavior.Wait, did I say Hillary Clinton? I meant Vice President Mike Pence. The Indianapolis Star published a striking scoop last night:

No one is denying the accuracy of the materials; they came from the state of Indiana itself. What’s more, an unspecified number of Pence’s emails were not released as part of the public-records request because, as the Star reported, “the state considers them confidential and too sensitive to release to the public.”So, where’s the hair-on-fire apoplexy?I should acknowledge that I don’t much care about Pence’s use of a private email account. If we’re ranking political controversies on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 representing “removal from office and criminal prosecution,” I’d give this story a 3, maybe a 4, on the merits.But I’d give Hillary Clinton’s email “scandal” roughly the same number. Email server protocols, which Americans were told to consider the nation’s most important issue in 2016, have always struck me as a trivial political sideshow.Some sense of fairness, however, is important. If Republicans, pundits, editors, and the political world in general considered Clinton’s emails a 9 on the scandal-o-meter, it’s absurd to think the revelations surrounding Pence’s emails deserve to be overlooked as unimportant.Indeed, Pence’s story is, to a very real extent, worse. It’s not just the hypocrisy — the Indiana Republican repeatedly attacked Clinton over emails during his bid for national office — it’s also the fact that Clinton’s system was never compromised, while Pence’s was.The Star‘s report added that Pence’s account “was actually compromised last summer by a scammer who sent an email to his contacts claiming Pence and his wife were stranded in the Philippines and in urgent need of money.” (Pence apologized to his contacts … and created a new AOL account.)There’s simply no reason there should be one standard for Democrats and another for Republicans. Pence handled sensitive information on a private, unsecured email account, a detail he never disclosed to voters. Will the political world now begin a debate about a special prosecutor? How about congressional hearings? Will there be an investigation? Will there be hundreds of editorials and thousands of hours of on-air chatter?Will Paul Ryan recommend stripping Pence of his security clearance? Will assorted partisans start chanting, “Lock him up” as a Pavlovian response to the vice president’s name?Again, removed from all context, I’d see these revelations as a blip on the radar. But the Clinton email story, which likely helped change the direction of world events in the 21st century, was effectively a pile of garbage from the start.If the Secretary of State’s emails were considered vitally important, there’s no excuse for holding the Vice President to a vastly more forgiving standard.