Picture the day Vice President Joe Biden wins the Democratic nomination for president in 2016.

Suddenly, the classified information Hillary Clinton stored on a private, insecure e-mail server is just grist for a juicy FBI investigation — not a defining issue in the presidential race. Suddenly, Clinton’s problematic record at the State Department is downgraded to a minor sub-section of the Republican argument against President Obama’s foreign-policy performance as a whole. Suddenly her pledge to Charles Woods, the father of a Navy SEAL killed in Benghazi, that she’d “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted” is a historical footnote, not a key revelation into the character of the Democratic nominee.

With Biden as the nominee, the Clinton Foundation and its shady, favor-seeking foreign and domestic donors vanish as a campaign issue. So do the thorny questions of quid pro quo impropriety, real or apparent, created by those donors’ favor-seeking while Clinton sat atop the State Department.