We had a government worker delete thousands of emails and use cleaning software on their computer
No doubt we've had thousands of government workers do just that. So what? It's perfectly legal to delete personal emails, and also legal to use software to make sure crooks don't recover data from those deleted sectors. You act as if there was some wrongdoing there. There's a reason that even the
Republican head of the FBI, despite a desperate desire to take Clinton down for his party, grudgingly had to admit there was no way to support an indictment.
and Trumps going down because someone in his cabinet spoke to a russian to get "dirt" on their campaign opponents?
Again, the impeachable offense here is obstruction of justice. You seem to be having trouble grasping that, so picture it in a scenario where your prejudices go the opposite way.
Say this is early 2016 and the FBI hasn't yet confirmed that Clinton committed no crime with regard to her email. Obama, however, doesn't like the political cost of even having that question investigated. So, after holding a meeting where Comey was one of several attendees, Obama has everyone else leave the room, then, once he has Comey isolated, he pressures him to abandon the email investigation. Comey's so rattled by it that he later writes a memo to the file memorializing that bizarre interference by the president in an ongoing investigation. Then, a little while later, when Obama realizes Comey's not going to take the message, he summarily fires him. The White House goes into damage control mode, with various Obama staffers scrambling desperately for some excuse for the Comey firing --something, anything, other than it being an attempt to obstruct the email investigation. They settle on something -- citing a memo from an assistant AG on some unrelated topic. But then Obama comes right out and admits that he'd already decided to fire Comey before that memo was authored, and that it was because of Comey's investigation of the email. Shortly thereafter, he's caught telling someone that he thinks the pressure has come off now that he fired the head of the FBI.
If it had played out like that --basically, the exact way it played out, only with the parties reversed-- there isn't a single right-winger or self-described centrist who wouldn't be calling that a clear case of obstruction of justice. They'd have nothing but contempt for the kind of apologist who'd call such a clear case of grave misconduct a "nothing burger."
It remains to be seen what conduct, exactly, was so terrible that Trump was willing to commit clear obstruction of justice in order to try to keep it from coming out. Now that Flynn is apparently cooperating with investigators, we may find out. But it doesn't really matter from a legal perspective -- Trump already committed an impeachable offense when he obstructed justice. The exact nature of the crime he was trying to cover up doesn't matter in terms of whether he should be impeached. The answer to that was "yes" at least as far back as the Comey firing, and arguably as far back as when he pressured Comey to drop the investigation. At this point, all we're doing is deciding how much longer the list of impeachable offenses will get.
