James Carville, reprising his role from the Monica Lewinsky era, has an op-ed in USA Today making a laughable defense of Hillary’s email scandal. It is such a lame defense that one imagines Carville had an intern write it. As there is no real defense for Hillary having at least 188 classified emails on an email server that not only was not encrypted and had minimal security safeguards but was stored in a facility that did not even have a burglar alarm, Carville blows smoke and flings poo but this isn’t the clever, thoughtful James Carville who worked for Bill Clinton. This old, lazy James Carville who just hopes his retainer check clears.

Let’s look at this sophomoric attempt to justify Hillary’s criminality.

Colin Powell did it.

I heard that when trying to get to the bottom of Colin Powell’s testimony that helped launch the war in Iraq, Congress couldn’t get a single email from him. And then nothing useful from Condoleezza Rice either.

Where did he hear this? From a dimbulb, left wing Massachusetts congressman, but I repeat myself, made a claim on a radio show:

“Colin Powell did not have a goddamn email available for us,” Lynch said. “Zero, zero.”

“It was the same thing with Condoleezza Rice,” he added. “There was not a goddamn email that was useful to the committee.”

I don’t even know what that means. At no time when the Democrats control Congress did they subpoena Powell’s or Rice’s emails. If the request was made before 2009, State had no moral, legal, or ethical requirement to respond to a request absent a subpoena. What State did or did not provide Lynch is immaterial. The fact is Powell’s emails were on a State Department server and could have been provided.

Colin Powell used personal email, too.

 Colin Powell said he has used his personal email address for work-related emails and said that he does not have any emails to turn over.

The link Carville gives points to the transcript of This Week from March 8, 2015. This is what Powell says:

POWELL: …But in order to change the culture, to change the brainware, as I call it, I started using it in order to get everybody to use it, so we could be a 21st century institution and not a 19th century.

But I retained none of those e-mails and we are working with the State Department to see if there’s anything else they want to discuss with me about those e-mails.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So they want…

POWELL: (INAUDIBLE) have a stack of them.

STEPHANOPOULOS: — they’ve asked you to turn them over, but you don’t have them, is that it?

POWELL: I don’t have any — I don’t have any to turn over. I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files.

And, in fact, a lot of the e-mails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and the State.gov domain. But I don’t know if the servers the State Department captured those or not.

And most — they were all unclassified and most of them, I think, are pretty benign, so I’m not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them.

Since the email scandal has metastasized, Powell has elaborated on how he used email.

During on an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Powell said he used one computer for sending sensitive material and a second for less important communications.

“I had a secure State Department machine for secure material and I had a laptop that I could use for email. I would email relatives, friends, but I would also email in the department,” he said.

Powell discussed his email setup in a chapter in his book, It Worked For Me. He addressed the topic again Sunday as Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faces criticism over her use of a private email account and computer server for official government business.

In other words, he followed government policy.

Federal government computers have been hacked.

According to CNN, the federal government in 2013 incurred almost 61,000 cyber-attacks and security breaches. On the other hand, there’s zero released evidence that Hillary Clinton’s emails were ever compromised.

Contrary to what Carville thinks he’s saying, the fact that secure government email servers have been compromised doesn’t make a case for Hillary’s Clampett-esque email system is above reproach. Not to mention that ‘zero released evidence’ is based on the fact that Clinton erased her server. What we do know is that there was highly classified material in Hillary Clinton’s email. So highly classified that the FBI’s counterintelligence team is investigating. We know that many, perhaps dozens, people had access to the server and they did not have the requisite clearances.

Twilight for a spin-meister.

This is a sad and pathetic effort by James Carville and clearly shows the man is well past his prime and past even caring about the damage he’s doing to his reputation with dross like this op-ed. The examples he gives are blatantly false and proven so by his own links. There was a time when a Carville defense merited a detailed fisking. This is only notable because of the lame attempt to exonerate Clinton because someone else might have done something similar. Kill your spouse and try using that as a defense. What is worse, he doesn’t even touch on the crux of the matter, which is that the FBI believes this is a big deal.