Until this summer, Democrats mostly figured that Hillary Clinton’s email scandal was one big nothingburger. This nonsense is nothing more than an unjustified conservative attack on a highly accomplished individual who is all but assured of being elected America’s first female president, they insisted. The whole thing will soon fade from the headlines, they blindly assured themselves.

Oops.

For too long, Democrats bought Clinton’s repeated defenses of her exclusive use of a private server while she ran the State Department. They believed that this potential security violation really was for her convenience, that she had copied other State Department addresses to preserve “90 percent” of her communications, and that no classified material was transmitted through the unauthorized and unsecured system. And if that had indeed all been true, Democrats might well have been right that the storm would pass, as has happened with other scandals involving the Clintons.

Read the article “The Contagious Toxicity of Hillary Clinton’s Email Scandal” on theweek.com.