Hillary Clinton's use of private e-mail account. Scandal? Or no scandal?

I am sure that many of you have already seen this story from the New York Times:  

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record. 

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act. 

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach. 

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

This of course has resulted in a veritable feeding frenzy among the Right Wing "news" outlets, which should surprise non one. 

But is it a scandal?

Well not according to her people, or the White House, which I'm sure knew about it all along.

This from Business Insider:  

Shortly after the Times story was published, Business Insider reached out to Clinton's representatives. They put us in touch with two former State Department officials who argued that Clinton was careful to use the address in a manner that went above and beyond regulatory requirements and ensured her communications were preserved. 

The former officials, who requested anonymity to freely discuss Clinton's emails and State Department policy, echoed the notion the former secretary's personalized email address was not kept secret. They said she used it to communicate with over 100 department staffers, other officials, and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. 

Clinton emailed from a personalized domain, clintonemail.com. Records show it was registered on the day of her confirmation hearing in January 2009. Along with State Department business, the officials said, Clinton also used the email address to communicate with friends and family. 

Her address was revealed in early 2013, shortly after she left the State Department. It was published when a hacker obtained messages written by her former aide, Sidney Blumenthal. 

The president's Principal White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz pointed to the hack when Business Insider emailed to ask whether the White House was aware of Clinton's use of a personal address. 

"This was public years ago," Schultz wrote. 

You know it would seem that if this were a problem the White House would have insisted that Hillary use her government email.

It would also seem that somebody as intelligent and experienced with this kind of thing as Hillary is, would have just automatically done so herself, without having to be told.

Things that make you go, hmmm.

You know many years ago I used to hang sheet rock.

At every job my boss would always make some really obvious, and easy to repair mistake. You know like a seam that was not covered very well, or a screw hole that was not filled in properly.

He said that clients always wanted to find something wrong so that they could get the satisfaction of making somebody who worked for them have to repair something. It made them feel that they had shown who was boss, and received good work from employees who may have done a shoddy job without their attention to detail.

In this way he said they would not simply invent reasons to make you do something over again, just to flex their muscles, and he was usually right about that.

So maybe, just maybe, Hillary has made an obvious mistake. Purposefully left a seam uncovered if you will, to give the Right Wing something to investigate and distract them from potentially more damaging avenues of attack.

Ultimately they will demand the emails, receive them, and find nothing damaging to use against her. 

Just a theory.