Hillary Clinton’s problems aren’t just politics

In Las Vegas a few days ago, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton seemed to almost crack. Correspondent Ed Henry - yes, representing Mrs Clinton nemesis FOX News, but still a journalist with undoubted chops - asked her: "Did you try to wipe the entire server?" Mrs Clinton answered, in this order: a) "I have no idea." b) "What? Like with a cloth or something?" and c) "I don't know how it works digitally at all." As she left the room. she delivered a final riposte to the assembled press: "Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys."

Nobody? In a week when the State Department told a court that 305 emails from her private server were being reviewed for security breaches? How did Hillary Clinton, the better half of a couple that has batted away this kind of scandal for a quarter-century, start sounding like a cornered Richard Nixon in a pink pantsuit?

Actually, the answer has a lot to do with Mr Nixon.

Let's be clear up front: We are not by any stretch talking Watergate here. But Mrs Clinton's email scandal - like many modern political scandals - is being given Watergate-like treatment. The scandal is now being fueled not just by journalists with fitful attention spans or congressional committees rabid with partisanship, but by the formidable investigative apparatus that Mr Nixon and Watergate left behind as their gifts to the American political system. A lot of physical and digital ink has already been spilled over Mrs Clinton's emails, so let's be brief. On the first day of Mrs Clinton's Senate confirmation hearings, an aide began setting up the private email account and server that she used instead of State Department email to do her public and private business throughout her tenure in office.

This spring, the State Department - spurred by Trey Gowdy head of the House committee investigating Benghazi - asked former secretaries of state for any emails they had on private servers. Clinton decided which emails to turn over and which ones to withhold and erase. Things might have ended there, sputtering and inconclusive. But the Republican chairmen of the Senate intelligence and foreign relations committees asked the inspectors general of the State Department and the intelligence community to investigate whether any classified information had been kept on private email servers.

Federal inspectors general have existed for a long time, but their offices were greatly strengthened after Watergate. In 1978, legislation established new inspectors general for the different intelligence agencies. These officials multiplied past the point of redundancy. In 2010, some of their functions were consolidated in a new office of the Inspector General of the Intelligence Community.

The first occupant of the office, former FBI agent Charles McCullough, examined Clinton email messages that the Benghazi committee had extracted from the State Department and said he had found classified information in them. McCullough tried to get wider access to the Clinton emails in State Department custody. But the department's undersecretary for management resisted, and the Clinton campaign claimed that the emails he cited hadn't been classified at the time they were sent.

The State Department, however, also has an inspector general. The nominees used to be appointed by the secretary. But 1980 legislation made them presidential appointees confirmed by the Senate - that is, far more independent. During Clinton's tenure at the State Department, a non-Senate-confirmed acting inspector general held the office. But in 2013, the Senate confirmed former federal prosecutor Steve Linick for the post.

Linick announced that the emails McCullough cited had in fact contained classified information at the time they were sent, though they may have not been marked as such. He also invited McCullough to share the investigation. At the end of July, a joint statement by the two inspectors general sought the intervention of the FBI, to which Clinton has now, finally, handed over her private email server.

Clinton's lawyer says the data on the server was erased by the time it was handed over. The consensus among forensics experts seems to be that much of the information can be recovered. Political people who have commented on the controversy point out that it is the result of the overclassification of government information. They say it also shows a failure by the intelligence community to admit that the dividing line between classified and unclassified information is murky and is breached all the time.

I sympathise. It has been many years since I worked for the State Department - as special assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, when he was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations - but the debate hasn't changed much. Even then, before Watergate made the federal investigative apparatus so much stronger, you bought yourself a world of trouble if you didn't show the proper respect toward the bureaucratic system and the people who administer it. The first time I ran up against the State Department's classification system, the problem involved a burn bag - literally, in those days, a bag in which the day's classified cables were deposited - and the fact that I hadn't properly disposed of it. Since this was my first offense, the penalty was that I had to write an explanation of exactly what had happened and how I was going to keep it from happening again - ever.

Clinton may survive. But it no longer seems prudent to put her chances at more than 50-50.