What's the Standard for "Substance"?

Newsweek, which sounds deep enough in the tank that I'm sure I hear an echo:

Despite the fact that no reputable journalist, including our own Kurt Eichenwald, nor any official government investigator has yet found any substance to the “criminality” charge Republicans level daily, in the hall of mirrors of American politics, she is now a perceived liar.

What would it take for a 'reputable journalist' or 'government investigator' to be taken to have found something of substance? They found Top Secret, SCI, keyword information sent in the clear. She has by her own admission destroyed emails that are, by law, official government records. She sent emails in the clear containing foreign government information, which official standards state clearly must be presumed classified, to a man named Sidney Blumenthal who has no security clearance whatsoever.

All of this is criminal. Indeed, these are all felonies. Some of it we have clear records of her having done, such as the Blumenthal emails that she personally wrote and sent, as well as the TS//SI/TK//NOFORN emails. Some of it we have her admission of having done.

Is it only 'substantial' when the government files charges? When they obtain convictions? When the convictions fail to be overturned on appeal?

"Reputable" journalists are supposed to hold the government to standards. They're not supposed to go along with the willful blindness of the powerful to lawbreaking by important members of their own political party. Shame on Newsweek, and anyone else who defines "reputable" in this way.

UPDATE: Viewed in light of Clinton's statement today, I have to regard this as a coordinated campaign in which Newsweek is only pretending to be an independent journalistic agency. This is the strategy, then: flat denial of any wrongdoing, in the fervent hope that nobody actually prosecutes clear violations of law provable with evidence already in the public sphere. It's astonishing, even for a Clinton.