The Wisconsin State Journal ran a front-page story earlier this week (as did other newspapers, as you will read) that Hillary Clinton’s email arrangements didn’t violate federal law.

James Taranto of the other WSJ (the superior Wall Street Journal) does the reporting those newspapers should have done, but didn’t:

The USA Today opinion page scored a nice little coup [Monday], getting an op-ed by a donor to Hillary Clinton’s campaign who argues that “there has been no evidence of criminal conduct” by the inevitable Democratic presidential nominee.

The piece, by lawyer Anne Tompkins, appears to be part of a didactic operation the Clinton campaign undertook in the last weeks of August. In an interview with the Puffington Host’s Sam Stein, published Aug. 21, communications director Jennifer Palmieri promised, in Stein’s paraphrase, “an end-of-summer effort to educate the public on the classification process for national security material.”

That would be the process that, as we noted Aug. 20, Mrs. Clinton’s staffers and other defenders insist is too complicated for anyone, much less Mrs. Clinton, to understand. So when they say they’re going to “educate the public,” it’s a safe bet they mean “try to confuse the public.”

Tompkins gives it her best shot, starting with an appeal to her own authority:

As the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of North Carolina, I oversaw the prosecution of Gen. [David] Petraeus, and I can say, based on the known facts, this comparison has no merit. The key element that distinguishes Secretary Clinton’s email retention practices from Petraeus’ sharing of classified information is that Petraeus knowingly engaged in unlawful conduct, and that was the basis of his criminal liability. . . .

The key element is that Petraeus’ conduct was done “knowingly.” That is, when he stored his journals containing “highly classified” information at his home, he did so knowingly. Petraeus knew at that time that there was classified information in the journals, and he knew they were stored improperly.

In sharp contrast, [Mrs.] Clinton is not being investigated for knowingly sending or receiving classified materials improperly.

She echoes a column from last week by David Ignatius of the Washington Post:

Does Hillary Clinton have a serious legal problem because she may have transmitted classified information on her private e-mail server? After talking with a half-dozen knowledgeable lawyers, I think this “scandal” is overstated. Using the server was a self-inflicted wound by Clinton, but it’s not something a prosecutor would take to court.

Ignatius quotes only one of these “knowledgeable lawyers” by name: Jeffrey Smith, whom he describes as “a former CIA general counsel who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter.”

In contrast with USA Today, which mentions Tompkins’s donation in her shirttail bio, “Ignatius and The Post failed to disclose that Smith served as a ‘close’ national security adviser for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign and that Smith has a history with the Clintons going back to at least President Bill Clinton’s election in 1992,” BlogressKristinn Taylor notes. (That history includes the CIA general counsel post, which he held in 1995-96.)

Even Smith doesn’t exactly exonerate Mrs. Clinton:

What happens in the real world of the State Department? Smith takes the hypothetical example of an assistant secretary who receives a classified cable from, say, Paris, about a meeting with the French foreign minister and wants quick guidance from the secretary. So he dashes off an e-mail—rather than sending a classified cable that would be seen by perhaps a dozen people.

“Technically, he has taken classified information and put it onto an unclassified system,” Smith said. “It’s the same as picking up a telephone and talking about it. It’s not right. But the challenge of getting the secretary’s attention—getting guidance when you need it—is an inevitable human, bureaucratic imperative. Is it a crime? Technically, perhaps yes. But it would never be prosecuted.”

Bumper-sticker suggestion: “Vote for Hillary. Her crimes are only technical.”

Ignatius backs up Smith’s assertion with a quotation from an unnamed source:

One former State Department official recalled the days when most embassies overseas had only a few phones authorized for secret communications. Rather than go to the executive office to make such a call, officers would use their regular phones, bypassing any truly sensitive details. “Did we cross red lines? No doubt. Did it put information at risk? Maybe. But, if you weren’t in Moscow or Beijing, you didn’t worry much,” this former official said.

In fact, you worried enough not to tell this story except under cover of anonymity.

“Back channels are used because the official ones are so encrusted by classification and bureaucracy,” Ignatius rationalizes. But there’s a crucial difference here: Mrs. Clinton had no front channel; the only way to reach her was through her private email server. As the Federalist’s Sean Davis notes:

The nature of Hillary’s secret, off-books private e-mail scheme made it impossible for government authorities to mark as classified any information that originated on Hillary’s private server, since they had no access to it. In fact, one of the newly released e-mails shows that the agency’s IT department had no knowledge of her private e-mail address and server scheme.

In anticipating this objection, Ignatius tries to have it both ways:

First, experts say, there’s no legal difference whether Clinton and her aides passed sensitive information using her private server or the official “state.gov” account that many now argue should have been used. Neither system is authorized for transmitting classified information.

He dwells on legal technicalities, and he also dismisses them, all in the interest of making Mrs. Clinton look innocent. He’s thinking like a defense lawyer, not a prosecutor or an investigator.

Last night the Associated Press published its own version of the Tompkins op-ed, raising the excuse to the level of purportedly objective journalism. Here’s the lead paragraph:

Experts in government secrecy law see almost no possibility of criminal action against Hillary Clinton or her top aides in connection with now-classified information sent over unsecure email while she was secretary of state, based on the public evidence thus far.

That qualification “based on the public evidence thus far”—or, as Tompkins puts it, “based on the known facts”—renders the excuse vacuous. Mrs. Clinton is (at least informally) suspected of mishandling secret information, so of course any incriminating details would not be publicly known.

There is, however, suggestive evidence. The Federalist’s Davis notes that some of the emails released last night by the State Department have redactions that indicate the information Mrs. Clinton sent and received was classified at the time it originated. A Fox News report puts the total number of classified emails in the dump at 125. Among the recipients of classified information from the secretary, Davis notes: “Sidney Blumenthal, a shady former Clinton White House operative who the Obama White House banned from federal employment.”

The AP, meanwhile—and in contrast with Tompkins and Ignatius—turns out not to be committed to Mrs. Clinton’s innocence. Deep in the same dispatch we find this:

Arguing that violations are common isn’t a valid defense for ordinary government employees, said Bradley Moss, a lawyer who often represents such people. They face discipline “all the time, in far more nuanced disputes than this,” he said.

Ed Morrissey expands on the point in the Fiscal Times:

Those with much lower profiles have done prison time for violations, in cases much less elaborate and deliberate than the secret server Hillary Clinton used to avoid legitimate and constitutional oversight by Congress and the courts. Others simply suspected of it have lost their clearances and their ability to be employed in responsible government or contractor jobs—a consequence that still has not been felt by Clinton or her aides that transmitted classified material through an unsecured and unauthorized system.

The commentary and coverage of the Hillary Clinton e-mail scandal mainly glosses over these concerns in favor of the daily up and down of campaign coverage. It puts the US media environment in the curious position of suggesting that there is less accountability for violators the higher rank they have.

Well, Richard Nixon once said, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” But Mrs. Clinton isn’t the president—at least not yet.