I mean, that's the only thing I can conclude. If you're assuming a priori that there's a crime, then you're putting the cart before the horse.
When you're assuming that counter points can only come from some sort of paid posters, you're being disrepectful.
This is why political topics are bad in HN. There's no news for nerds in here, just lots of people playing fast and loose with the facts to score political points.
then perhaps the reasonable thing to conclude is that it is not an act that somebody should go to jail for. I mean, that's the only thing I can conclude.
It's not a defense, it's a counter to the idea that "if anyone else did this, they'd be fired and charged". Obviously that's not true, because (as noted in the comment to which you replied) others did it and no one was fired or went to jail.
But Powell and Rice, occupying the same level of power as Clinton during her term, I understood it as a condemnation of the privileges of political power in general and not a privilege of a particular political party.
I understand somebody being paid by the Democratic party or one of Hillary's SuperPACs to try to push this argument, but for a regular citizen to attempt it shows just how successful the suggested partisanship of the US political system is in dividing regular citizens to act against their own best interests.