A short history note regarding official emails and documents

A radical right Republican Party propaganda talking point has been and sometimes still is self-righteous moral outrage over Democrats' sloppy handling of emails and official documents that belong to the US government and are supposed to be archived. Hillary Clinton was vilified and investigated for it while improperly using a personal server. The GOP howled in sanctimonious outrage over Clinton's alleged sloppiness and incompetence on this point. She was a severe national security threat and whatnot. The Republican rank and file was foaming at the mouth over this outrage and demanding justice.

LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! 

And, when the ex-president was recently found to have stolen documents, including some classified papers, his shameless party said nothing. It was just hypocrisy as usual for the Republicans. The ranks and file was just hunky dory with the theft.

But, there was another incident about improper document handling that has been mostly forgotten but should be mentioned for convenient recall. Under president Bush, his email communications were run through Republican Party servers, not government servers. In yet another failure to vindicate the rule of law, the Republican Party erased millions of Bush emails. No criminal prosecution resulted. Newsweek wrote this about it in 2016:

For 18 months, Republican strategists, political pundits, reporters and Americans who follow them have been pursuing Hillary Clinton's personal email habits, and no evidence of a crime has been found. But now they at least have the skills and interest to focus on a much larger and deeper email conspiracy, one involving war, lies, a private server run by the Republican Party and contempt of Congress citations—all of it still unsolved and unpunished.

Clinton's email habits look positively transparent when compared with the subpoena-dodging, email-hiding, private-server-using George W. Bush administration. Between 2003 and 2009, the Bush White House "lost" 22 million emails. This correspondence included millions of emails written during the darkest period in America's recent history, when the Bush administration was ginning up support for what turned out to be a disastrous war in Iraq with false claims that the country possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD), and, later, when it was firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons.

Like Clinton, the Bush White House used a private email server—its was owned by the Republican National Committee. And the Bush administration failed to store its emails, as required by law, and then refused to comply with a congressional subpoena seeking some of those emails. "It's about as amazing a double standard as you can get," says Eric Boehlert, who works with the pro-Clinton group Media Matters. "If you look at the Bush emails, he was a sitting president, and 95 percent of his chief advisers' emails were on a private email system set up by the RNC. Imagine if for the last year and a half we had been talking about Hillary Clinton's emails set up on a private DNC server?" (emphasis added)

And, lest  we forget, one other quick point merits mention. The email issue was a non-trivial factor that lost Clinton the 2016 election. That disaster resulted in election of a mendacious, corrupt, demagogic tyrant-wannabe. So, don't forget about Republican Party hypocrisy and official documents and emails. They are wicked important.

Note the date: Oct. 28, 2016, 

about 1 week before the election

That's been your daily serving of political history.