By omitting important information and context from the Hillary Clinton email story, are reporters and pundits guilty of trying to make the episode more interesting and more nefarious than it actually is?

As the press demands answers regarding which private emails Clinton handed over to the State Department and which ones she withheld because she deemed them to be personal in nature, many journalists fail to include relevant information about prominent Republicans who have engaged in similar use of private email accounts while in office, specifically former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

By omitting references to Powell and Bush and how they handled private emails while in office, the press robs news consumers of key information. It's also material that deflates the overheated suspicions of a wide-ranging Clinton cover-up.

Appearing on ABCs This Week on Sunday, Powell was asked how he responded to the State Department request last year that all former secretaries hand over emails from their time in office. Powell confirmed that he had used private email while secretary but that he didn't hand over any emails to the State Department because his private emails were all gone.

“I don't have any to turn over,” he explained. “I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off. I do not have thousands of pages somewhere in my personal files.”  Powell's revelation is important because it puts into perspective the email protocol of a former secretary of state. By his own account, Powell's emails, unlike Clinton's, include his regular communications with foreign dignitaries. What was he emailing them in the lead-up to the war in Iraq? We'll never know.

To date however, both the New York Times and the Washington Post have largely downplayed references to the fact that Powell's private, secretary of state emails are all gone.

Why is Powell relevant to Clinton? Because after she took questions from the reporters yesterday about the email saga, the press focused in on the fact in reviewing her private emails, Clinton found roughly 60,000 messages. She handed over 30,000 to the State Department and determined the other 30,000 were personal in nature and disgarded them.

Those 30,000 emails have now become the key storyline, which goes like this: How can people be assured that Clinton turned over all the pertinent emails when she was the one (or her attorney) who decided which ones were personal, and would be withheld, and which ones were government-related, and would be turned over. Doesn't there need to be an "independent arbiter" to look over all 60,000 emails to decide which ones the State Department gets to keep?

“They were personal and private about matters I believed were in the scope of my personal privacy,” Clinton said. “They have nothing to do with work. I didn't see any reason to keep them.” That's what the so-called scandal revolves around: Hillary's team decided which emails to turn over and which ones to toss. And that's a deeply troubling development. The press is insistent on that fact.

And so here's why Jeb Bush's name is conspicuously absent from the current coverage: He did the exact same thing. Like, the exact same thing.

From the Tampa Bay Times [emphasis added]:

The former governor conducted all his communication on his private Jeb@jeb.org account and turned over the hand-selected batch to the state archives when he left office. Absent from the stash are emails the governor deemed not relevant to the public record: those relating to politics, fundraising and personal matters while he was governor.

And again here, the Tampa Bay Times reported Bush, “hand-picked emails from his time as governor to help build his case for a 2016 primary run for president.”  

Who decided which emails were “relevant to the public record”? Jeb Bush.

Obviously if journalists consistently include that nugget it deflates the Clinton narrative, especially the one about her being uniquely secretive. If Jeb Bush, who might be the Republican nominee for president, went through half-a-million private emails from his days as governor and self-selected which one's he'd let the public see and which one were truly private, that completely diminishes the media's preferred narrative that Clinton went rogue and somehow broke all the rules.

She did not. But that's not the story the press wants to tell.