A high-ranking public servant using a personal rather than government email account to send correspondence sounds minor on the surface, but when compared to the hubbub fomented over a possible presidential candidate's verbal comparison of his handling of unions to the potential handling of foreign policy, it seems like a national scandal.
The truth is a comment by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker comparing the handling of unions and the Islamic State is, in fact, much ado about nothing. And the use of a personal rather than government email account by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton probably isn't the end of the world. But it does show a continuing pattern of a public servant saying one thing and doing another.
Fresh from revelations about the lack of equal pay for men and women in her senatorial office while she preached equity, and questions about Clinton Foundation foreign fundraising while she was secretary of state, Clinton, it was reported in The New York Times, may have violated federal requirements that officials' correspondence be retained as part of an agency's record.
When she stepped down as secretary of state in early 2013, her personal/government emails were to have been preserved, a requirement of the Federal Records Act, but her office didn't act on the matter until responding to a new State Department compliance effort two months ago.
Although she turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the department, no one knows what wasn't turned over, how it was determined what would be turned over, and if she will be forced to turn over the rest.
For a potential presidential candidate, the explanation by a Clinton spokesman that she has been complying with the "letter and spirit of the rules" in the matter is not good enough.