Monday night, it was revealed that Hillary Clinton used a personal email account the entire time she served as secretary of state. Not only does conducting official business with a private account violate federal law, it raises a host of concerns ranging from whether or not her communications were secure from foreign intelligence services, to whether we’ll be able to piece together an accurate historical record. Given Hillary Clinton’s legal troubles in the 1990s relating to keeping track of documents, it seems implausible she was not aware of the illegality of what was going on. 

But one aspect of this story that deserves special focus is what this revelation about the former secretary of state’s peculiar email habits tell us about how thorough the investigations of Benghazi have been to date. Indeed, the notion that investigators did not have access to Hillary Clinton’s email would suggest that investigators lacked crucial information. And yet, the media largely bought the spin from Clinton’s camp and the White House that GOP investigations into Benghazi had crossed into overreach. Journalists even propagated a cutesy social media gimmick to make this point.