I’ve never felt any kinship with Hillary Clinton, but a press-conference remark that she shared yesterday in Las Vegas not only made me laugh — it almost made me want to hug her. From The Hill‘s Ben Kamisar: “Asked if her email server, which has been turned over to the Department of Justice, had been wiped clean, Clinton initially shrugged and later joked, ‘Like with a cloth or something? I don’t know how it works digitally at all.'”

Clinton may have had dark Machiavellian reasons for deleting all those emails, but I suspect that most of the tale is contained within that “cloth” quote. Like many boomer and GenX women I’ve known, Clinton is just a technical klutz. That’s it. Coupled with her natural tendency towards secrecy and paranoid thinking about the people who are out to get her, that’s probably the whole thing. If she was more knowledgable about email accounts and had to do it all over again, she’d almost certainly not repeat this mistake. But she made it and now she’s stuck in it.

I was surprised to read this morning that MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, who’s always struck me as a relatively fair-minded guy, now believes that Hillary “appears more vulnerable than ever.” The FBI’s involvement is key, he said. “This is no longer…she can’t just say this is a partisan witch-hunt by the House Republicans,” Todd remarked. “The FBI is now investigating regarding the classified info situation.”

“The best explanation still questions her initial judgment of why did she do this in the first place, and really was the only motivation to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests,” Todd said. “It feels as if that’s the only reason she did this. So look, I think this is a problem for her ongoing. I don’t know if it’s a way to stop her from getting the nomination.”

I suspect that wanting to avoid Freedom of Information act requests was largely a gut call as opposed to a devious and calculating one. Hillary is the sort of person who sees predators and serpents lurking around every tree trunk and under every rock. Couple this attitude with a less-than-sophisticated understanding of email protocol and that’s what has led her into this gulch, this gulley, this vale of troubles.