[throwanem]

You're conflating a well-secured email server administered in conjunction with State's infosec team - which I agree would be perfectly reasonable from a security perspective - and what actually obtained in the case at hand.

You're also conflating the responsibilities of State Department personnel with regard to information classified by the government they've sworn to serve, and the responsibilities of other nations' diplomatic personnel with regard to information originating in the government of a state foreign to them.

Neither seems especially conducive to a useful discussion of the matter at hand.

[beat]

It's not especially conductive to the dream of charging Hillary Clinton, I suppose. But it's a good point.

More to the point, shadow IT exists for a reason. Taken out of the context of the State Department and the political sphere, this was classic shadow IT. I've used shadow IT, and I've provided shadow IT, because I've worked a lot in large, sluggish bureaucracies, and that's How Things Get Done sometimes. "Security" becomes a catch-all excuse for laziness and cowardice.

If she felt like she could do her job with the existing State Department tools, she wouldn't have set up a shadow IT operation, period. It's not like she's completely ignorant of either operational security or political ramifications. To do this, she must have felt thoroughly hampered by the existing system.

[throwanem]

I'm sure she did. Perhaps that's a mitigation, and perhaps it's not. Assuming you're right about the extent to which using blessed IT would have made it impossible for Clinton to discharge her diplomatic office, she might have resigned, rather than choose between being derelict in her duty and being derelict in the responsibility she accepted with her oath of office. A high-profile resignation like that, in a preeminent department like State, might have been a cause for real change. Or it might not; we'll never know. In any case, it would've been the principled thing for anyone in such a position to do.

Sticking around at the expense of her oath of office doesn't seem to have worked out all that poorly for her, since she's still apparently a serious contender for the presidency. Should she end up in it, one hopes she'll take that oath a little more seriously than she did the last one.

[beat]

So she spent four years doing a job she loved, building her credibility for the job she dreamed of probably since childhood, and she did it very well (or as you call it (derelict in her duty and expense of her oath of office). She ran shadow IT so she could do her job efficiently. The cost of it politically was a partisan outrage-scandal that didn't actually change anyone's opinion - those who hate on her would have hated on her anyway, and those who don't aren't interpreting this as treason.

I'd say she won.