Wonder what is being made of Hillary Clinton’s private email system by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. We are not about to suggest that there is no scandal in the way Mrs. Clinton conducted her official communications while she was our chief diplomat. It will be illuminating, though, to see how she justifies setting up in her own private home the server that handled her wire traffic over the Internet. In the age of Wikileaks and Edward Snowden, is it possible that this was, whether or not crosswise with the law, a prudent maneuver?

We are not the first to raise this question. One technology expert, Clay Johnson, who has worked in politics and for government agencies, was quoted by the Daily Beast as saying that, while he had no knowledge of Clinton’s decision-making, “it was possible,” as the Beast paraphrased him, that “she decided the State Department’s own networks weren’t secure enough.” Not just from Wikileaks but from foreign governments hacking our senior-most officials.

Wikileaks was launched in 2007. No doubt many think it is a dandy idea. The New York Times and the Guardian newspapers became, for a while, collaborators with Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. Mrs. Clinton, who became state secretary in 2009, was not among the scheme’s admirers. If a private system were being set up for the collection and publication of classified State Department cable traffic, is it possible that a prudent state secretary might be tempted to go to the edge of the law, or even over it, to protect her wire traffic?

It strikes us that Republicans might want to think these things through. Did Mrs. Clinton do the same kind of thing that Wikileaks has been doing, that is, moving government messages onto its own servers? Or was she doing the opposite, putting government message out of reach of those who mean her — and our country — harm? If it was the latter, how successful was this effort? This might require the government seizing and examining her servers.

Where is the line to be drawn in respect of the ownership of cable traffic of our political appointees? We understand there are laws on this head; they suggest that most of the mail is America’s property. The New York Times last week quoted an expert lawyer, Jason Baron, as saying that it would be “difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business.”

Only time, though, will tell what is in Mrs. Clinton’s cables. Maybe there is a lot of damaging information. But when Governor Palin of Alaska was eventually forced to disgorge vast troves of her email, reporters looking for salacious or scandalous messages came up with zilch. Either Mrs. Palin wasn’t doing anything wrong. Or she kept it off the wires. For our part, we’re less concerned about Mrs. Clinton’s modus operandi — whose server she was using and whether it was a private email — than the substance of the Clinton doctrine.

That strikes us as unacceptably vague, even vapid, after all these years. Her support of Israel is not unalloyed (her husband sent a raft of operatives to the Jewish State to try to defeat the Likud in the 1999 election). She is no better than anyone else on Jerusalem. She’s hinted at a hard line on Iran but backed President Obama’s appeasement. Her re-set with Russia is a joke. She made erroneous statements in respect of the riots in Egypt and Libya, laying the blame a film protesting mistreatment of Coptic Christians.

There are, in short, no achievements. That is a bigger scandal than the question of through what servers she ran her email in the age of hackers and Internet spies. It could be a case of the scandal being not in what’s illegal but in what’s legal. Wouldn’t it be something if the woman who wants to be our next president went to all this trouble to set up a private email system, safe from prying eyes of her rivals in government, only for it to be discovered that she did nothing of substance worth protecting?