What could make Hillary Clinton's FOIA-thwarting State Department private email story worse? The fact that she has repeatedly misled the public about how the scandal came to be in the first place.
WaPo:
Throughout the controversy over her use of a private e-mail system while she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton has described her decision last year to turn over thousands of work-related e-mails as a response to a routine-sounding records request.
[...]
But State Department officials provided new information Tuesday that undercuts Clinton’s characterization. They said the request was not about general recordkeeping but was prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system. They also said they first contacted her in the summer of 2014, at least three months before the agency asked Clinton and three of her predecessors to provide their e-mails.
More than three months before the October "routine request," the State Department asked Clinton - and Clinton alone - for her private emails in a very un-routine request. The decision to ask the other former SoS's - that came about because they had discovered that they had "no government account emails for Clinton":
“We realized there was a problem,” said a State Department official who until that moment had not been aware of Clinton’s private e-mail set-up. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.
Hillary Clinton is a terrible example of leadership on the issue of govenment transparency - an issue Dems, and especially leading Dem presidential candidates, should be
way above the board on, not miles below it. Adding this blatant dishonesty from Clinton on the genesis of this story just makes it worse.
Update: This is what it says on Hillary Clinton's own website about this:
Why didn't Clinton provide her emails to the State Department until December 2014?
In 2014, after recognizing potential gaps in its overall recordkeeping system, the State Department asked for the help of the four previous former Secretaries in meeting the State Department's obligations under the Federal Records Act.
According to this WaPo story, this is plainly dishonest. It didn't come about "after recognizing potential gaps in its overall recordkeeping system" - it came about because Hillary Clinton, while the head of the State Department, didn't properly keep
her own email records. (And the "asked for the help of the four previous former Secretaries" is deception-by-subraction, as well.)