At least that’s how it seems.

Take Cheryl Mills, for example, who says the whole problem of not turning all those e-mails over was because of Benghazi. Honest!

Cheryl Mills, the former chief of staff at the State Department, partly blamed the Benghazi terrorist attack for former Secretary Hillary Clinton failing to turn over her emails as she left office in 2013, saying there was “a lot going on” that distracted them from fulfilling their obligations under open records laws.

Ms. Mills, in sworn testimony ordered by a federal judge taken last week and released Tuesday, said Mrs. Clinton and her team were occupied with too many other things to think about going through their official records and making sure they remained with the department — a requirement of multiple federal laws and agency policies.

Among those were Mrs. Clinton’s upcoming departure from office and the September 2012 attack that cost the life of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.

“The secretary was not only transitioning, there had been a — we had lost our first ambassador in quite some time, and we were stepping through the sets of issues associated with that. And she, too, had fallen ill, and there — and there had been a period of time where we were obviously navigating a whole set of issues in that space,” Ms. Mills said. “So I don’t know that this was something that I focused on, and certainly I wish I had.”

So because of Benghazi, they were distracted – and it took four years to get undistracted and release the e-mails.

Nobody believes any of this. The paid hacks at the DNC don’t even believe it. They all know it’s BS, and all they want is for the whole thing to go away. Problem is, it won’t go away. The State Department Inspector General’s report makes clear that every defense Hillary has offered so far for her conduct in secreting her e-mail away from the public is invalid and based on lies, and in a just republic the way would be clear to commence a prosecution of her.

That prosecution isn’t going to happen, of course. It isn’t going to happen because in order to get Hillary to step aside and let Joe Biden, or someone else, parachute in as the Democrats’ nominee they’re going to have to cut a deal with her that will include a public statement from the president that she did nothing wrong and a blanket pardon before the election to keep her from ever being prosecuted. That would only happen when there is a clear showing in the polls that Hillary is dead in the water as a candidate, and we are not at that point and it’s unlikely we’ll get there.

And if she wins, of course, the entire e-mail scandal becomes a dead letter and the Clintons will have gotten away with the most unbelievable influence-peddling scandal in American history. What that does to the rule of law in this country can’t be dismissed; it’s uncertain what the moral case for, say, paying taxes would be if she’s the president and American policy has already been auctioned off to the world’s worst people.

It’s a damn shame the Republican Party’s nominee is demonstrating himself to be merely a different type of awful, because this election cycle offered the opportunity to crush this woman and the party which, so far, stands with her.