The lessons of Watergate, however, have never been applied to the Obama White House. Hillary Clinton’s email scandal isn’t an outlier; it’s the culmination of a presidency that has been contemptuous of accountability and public scrutiny from day one. Attorney General Eric Holder was held in contempt of Congress after he withheld 92 percent of the relevant documents from investigators, ignoring subpoenas, and silenced Justice Department employees in the investigation relating to the still-unexplained Fast and Furious scandal, in which the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms gave Mexican drug cartels thousands of guns resulting in scores of deaths, including that of a U.S. border patrol agent.

Even after Obama preposterously insisted there was not a “smidgen of corruption” at the IRS, despite the agency’s admission that it had improperly targeted conservative groups seeking nonprofit status, the IRS defied a congressional subpoena and destroyed 24,000 emails to and from Lois Lerner, the official most implicated in the corruption. Not a single IRS employee has ever faced charges.

And Eric Holder, former EPA secretary Lisa Jackson, and former health and human services secretary Kathleen Sebelius were all known to have used email pseudonyms for public business in ways that, to varying degrees, may have run afoul of the law. Use of email pseudonyms in the Obama administration was so pervasive, the recent revelations suggest the idea of doing so may have come straight from the top.