Hillary Clinton's credibility on email story continues to shrink

Washington Examiner Editorial:

Pope Francis' visit has been a real boon for people who really follow the news. To be sure, the pontiff's dominance of headlines and airtime has spread his message of hope and his critique of materialism. But beyond that, it has also given Washingtonians a chance to leak bad news when they think everyone is distracted by something else.

On Tuesday, as the pope arrived, the State Department finally came come clean about another untruth former Secretary Hillary Clinton has been telling for months about her emails. On at least eight occasions, Clinton has said the State Department approached her last fall with a routine request for her emails. As she put it Sunday, "When we were asked to help the State Department make sure they had everything from other secretaries of state, not just me, I'm the one who said, 'Okay, great, I will go through them again.'"

But on Tuesday, as all eyes were on the pope's little black Fiat on the Andrews aerodrome, State contradicted Clinton, telling the Washington Post that the request was "prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system."

In other words, the request was made because Clinton had blindsided State's bureaucracy with her previously undisclosed decision to withhold all her work emails for nearly six years.

Last year, when Congress began investigating the murder of Washington's ambassador to Libya and three other men, people at State realized what had been going on — or at least realized they could no longer cover the fact that Clinton's emails were not available to give to congressional investigators.

"In the process of responding to congressional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton," a State Department spokesman told the Post. "State Department officials contacted her representatives during the summer of 2014 to learn more about her email use and the status of emails in that account."

Note that State here contradicts not only Clinton's story about its reasons for demanding her correspondence, but also the time frame in which it happened.

Why is Clinton's story at odds with that of the State Department? The Des Moines Register editorial board had a chance to ask her just as this story broke. Her response was, "I can't answer that."
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Even before cross examination she continues to harm her own credibility by saying things that are inconsistent with the facts.  At some point people are going to have to wonder whether she is just a bad liar or is suffering from dementia.

Focus groups say they do not think she is telling the truth when she talks.