There are scandals, and then there are scandals.  Some are hard to follow, such as Whitewater, the allegations that the IRS was targeting conservatives, and even "Fast & Furious."  Even Watergate was hard to follow until someone said that President Nixon had recorded his conversations.

Then you have Hillary Clinton's email scandal.  Frankly, every employee in the U.S. knows that you can't mix your personal email with your business.  Most people sign an employee manual confirming that they understand the company rules about the internet.

This is why Hillary Clinton is in trouble.  And she has herself to blame, as Wesley Pruden pointed out:

She and Bubba have been playing by rules they wrote to suit themselves, rules which apply to nobody but them. The wheel that goes around comes around, and sometimes twice. And this time there's finally a shrinking constituency of Democrats willing to give the lady an even break.

She's counting on the slender hope that nobody out there understands or cares about a lot of geek talk about computers, hard drives, servers and emails. Everybody hates his computer a good part of the time, anyway, and only in Washington are people actually paying attention to "Hillary Horror Movie, the Sequel."

But if Hillary gives the story a 70 percent discount, her own experts, analysts and consultants don't. She may ride this one out; she has the money to repair, hide and deny a lot of damage. Or this time, maybe not. The number of her suspicious emails, now in the hands of the FBI to see whether she recklessly stored some of the nation's top secrets on her vulnerable private server, have ballooned from four to the hundreds in a matter of days.

The story is no longer limited to websites of what Hillary famously calls "the vast right-wing media conspiracy" — The Washington Times, the New York Post, Fox News, several news sites on the Internet and dozens of blogs — but the seepage into the so-called mainstream media threatens to become a torrent.

"Follow the trail here," Bob Woodward of The Washington Post tells MSNBC, "There are all these emails. They were sent to someone, or someone sent them to her. So, if things were erased here, there's a way to go back to these emails, or who received them from Hillary Clinton. You've got a massive amount of data that, in a way, reminds me of the Nixon tapes."

Where does this go?  Let me leave the legal stuff and analysis to smarter AT contributors.

I will speak of the political, perhaps an even harder punishment.

How does candidate Hillary Clinton explain any of this in a 2016 fall debate?  What is she going to say?  How does she reconcile contradictory statements so far?  

How does she address the recklessness of having a U.S. secretary of state operating outside the government's secured network?  Why was she so obsessed with secrecy?  Didn't it occur to her that this would come out someday?  Did she really believe that she'd get away with it?

It's going to be very hard to deal with this topic in a presidential campaign. 

Again, how can someone this reckless aspire to the presidency?  My guess is that a lot of Democrats will soon get it and look for someone else.

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