There are 31,380 Clinton e-mails we’ll never see. There’s something wrong with that.

[Commentary] 31,380. That's the number of e-mails that Hillary Clinton and her lawyers deemed "private, personal records" and, therefore, neither turned over to the State Department nor preserved in any way, shape or form. What that means: Roughly half of all e-mails -- 62,320 -- that Clinton sent and received during her time as the nation's top diplomat are gone forever. And that the only way anyone can verify that they were, as Clinton insisted, "private" and "personal" is to take her word for it. People being paid by Clinton reviewed -- whether individually or through a series of filtered searches -- all of her e-mails and made a decision that more than 30,000 of them were purely personal.

The problem for Clinton (or at least the problem I see) is that we won't ever be able to check whether the judgment used by her lawyers was the right judgment. I'm not suggesting that she should have been required to publicly release every e-mail -- professional or personal -- she sent during her time at State. There's plenty of private things that she has every right to keep private. But the decision to destroy all of those e-mails means that the possibility of having an independent review of them by some trusted figure (or figures) is entirely impossible.