[Nor is there evidence that Chinese intelligence assets could have been outed that way.]
Of course there is. The State Department is the customer for the CIA’s data collection efforts from its foreign national spies. From “Top Secret” on down, there is a timeline for the dissemination of classified information to various parties inside foreign governments. What Hillary’s e-mails provide is a timeline that China’s information made its way to the CIA, which then routed it to the State Department. As with news, information provided by foreign national spies is most useful when it is fresh, so there’s a pretty good chance that whatever info was provided by the CIA to State was handed over pretty much just after the CIA obtained it from the Chinese national who provided it.
This is a fairly traditional technique for mole hunting. The mole hunters (China) attempt to find out what the enemy (the US) knew and when he (the US) knew it, and connect the dots back to when the information was disseminated to domestic government officials (China) on a need-to-know basis. The advantage they have over murder cases is that the espionage is presumably ongoing, and they can surreptitiously monitor the suspects to the point that the actual mole attempts to communicate with his agent handler/case officer. Then the net closes around the mole.
This is how Hillary’s e-mails led to their exposures and deaths. By providing the breadcrumbs necessary towards outing them.
Thanks for that explanation. That still requires Chinese access to the emails on the server. There's an indication in the FBI report that someone got on and read emails via a user with an email account on the server. There was no indication in the FBI report that the server was "hacked". But when I read the FBI report in 2016 I actually trusted the FBI to put out a relatively complete report, with redactions that weren't there to protect the guitly.
I now know not to trust the FBI on this issue at least. So thanks again for the explanation and it would be nice to know what actually happened.