> "coming clean" about the emails would have been preferable

I'm not suggesting there was anything to come clean about. But there were emails indicating that some of the campaign finance stuff relating to the Clinton Foundation was not above board. Not only did HRC not address this issue, but she didn't claim that the organization was just like many other similar orgs, or offer to offer a full audit of where the dollars went. Those are the totally obvious responses to allegations that lines have been crossed.

True, doing that would have played into the idea that the story was real, but keep in mind that there were emails from a disgruntled loyalist who was mad at Chelsea threatening to reveal the scheme as fraud.

The news orgs generally ignored this story for some reason, so maybe that's why there wasn't a specific response to it offered by the campaign, but in my view it is not really clear whether it was completely above board or not. Per my earlier comment elsewhere in the thread, I am concerned that lifetime public servant Paul Ryan has a net worth of $8M, and that the Clintons are worth $250M after public service careers.

What are the odds that Paul Ryan obtained that money legitimately? I'd say they are quite slim. If emails about Ryan were found that indicated a likely corrupt source of the funds, I'd hope that some journalist somewhere would pick up the story and take it to fruition. I'd hope the same thing about any major US political candidate, if there is evidence that a massive ($250M) fortune might have been improperly won through deals that violate campaign finance law.

It's not that I don't think Ryan or Clinton are relatively good "knowledge workers" for the jobs they end up in, it's that the purpose of campaign finance law is to prevent interest groups from being able to buy their way in. If we let our "nice" politicians get bought by interest groups in ways that violate campaign finance law, we are allowing the corrupting incentives to exist that campaign finance law is meant to prevent.

Surely, by the same token, congress should pass a law requiring the publication of a decade or more of income tax history for any personal wealth or companies where the candidate as a majority shareholder. Note that in spite of the massive opposition to Trump's failure to offer up his tax returns, no such law has been discussed. Chances are quite a few officials or would-be officials would rather not be subject to additional transparency requirements.

Comey's involvement was truly odd. I thought he should have been more thorough/careful before he dismissed the possibility of any wrongdoing initially. How long does it take for a team of people to review a few thousand emails. I think it could be done in a weekend if there was any motivation at all to resolve the issue in a timely fashion. So Comey not only chose to allow his actions to impact the election, but allowed his agency's tarnishing of the campaign to drag on and on in a completely unreasonable way. So in my view his last-minute comments were one of several major blunders. He's been challenged over his decisions, but I have not heard him challenged on why it takes so long to review emails. Of the 20K emails most were spam just like in any inbox. So we're talking about a few thousand pages of reading that took months and months for no apparent reason.