When you say "highly illegal", what sort of legal expertise and/or understanding of this do you have? I'm a lawyer, but don't know much about pay-to-play crimes. My understanding is that it's a pretty goddamn hard crime to prove (need extremely strong link between donation and reward), and that most of what is characterized as pay-to-play is actually legal, just the normal unseemly way politics gets done in our country. I'm no fan of Hillary, but I suspect she and her assistants are well aware of the laws, may have stretched things to limit but careful not to step over. In any case, the bald-faced statement that what she did was "highly illegal" strikes me as suspect. (The situation with email server strikes me as similar.)