A judge decided on Wednesday not to make the State Department find and review any of the 31,000 emails Clinton’s lawyers deemed personal, because being on a private email server makes them FOIA exempt:

District Judge Reggie Walton said that the demand from Judicial Watch — a conservative organization involved in multiple lawsuits over Clinton’s emails — was beyond his jurisdiction. The fact that Clinton used only her personal property in setting up the private email system — and not any devices issued by the State Department — means the issue is beyond the scope of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Walton said. “I just don’t see what my authority under FOIA would be,” he said during a hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “It seems to me, having not used State Department devices … it would be difficult … for me to conclude… that the information contained on her private server … is information that the State Department possessed.”

This is, of course, remarkably convenient for Clinton: Using a private email server is what caused this whole debacle to begin with, and it’s also what’s allowing her to avoid a full investigation of her actions.

This isn’t the only way Clinton has managed to wiggle out of accountability in this email scandal. As I’ve noted before here at Rare, her decision to print the emails she turned over was actually really deceptive—it obscured all kinds of significant digital information that a simple electronic transfer would have preserved—as well as the cause of a massive waste of taxpayers’ money and State employees’ time thanks to a lengthy re-digitization process.