Hillary Clinton's email lies get harder to defend, but liberals are still trying

James Taranto:

The New York Times’s Michael Schmidt has been doing some excellent reporting on the Hillary Clinton email scandal, but one has to wonder if his editors are holding him back. Buried on page A14 of today’s paper is a story that begins as follows:

Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters last month that the memos about Libya she received while secretary of state from Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime adviser whom the Obama administration had barred her from hiring, had been “unsolicited.”

But email records that Mrs. Clinton, according to officials briefed on the matter, apparently failed to turn over to the State Department last fall show that she repeatedly encouraged Mr. Blumenthal to “keep ’em coming,” as she said in an August 2012 reply to a memo from him, which she called “another keeper.”

All or part of 15 Libya-related emails she sent to Mr. Blumenthal were missing from the trove of 30,000 that Mrs. Clinton provided to the State Department last year, as well as from the 847 that the department in turn provided in February to the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. The emails were reviewed by a reporter.

Much more interesting than the content of the emails, though, is the confirmation that Mrs. Clinton was not telling the truth when she said the following at her March 10 press conference:

After I left office, the State Department asked former secretaries of state for our assistance in providing copies of work-related emails from our personal accounts. I responded right away and provided all my emails that could possibly be work-related, which totalled roughly 55,000 printed pages, even though I knew that the State Department already had the vast majority of them. We went through a thorough process to identify all of my work-related emails and deliver them to the State Department.

Schmidt had already broken on Friday (albeit back on page A18) the story that “15 emails . . . were missing from records that she has turned over.” But the even more damning detail is mentioned only in passing in both stories—in the third paragraph of today’s, and the sixth paragraph of Friday’s, to wit:

Of the 15 Blumenthal emails in question, only nine were missing in their entirety. Printouts of the other six were turned over with parts missing, which would mean they were identified as official emails and then redacted by somebody in Mrs. Clinton’s employ. That points even more clearly to an active effort at withholding evidence than do entirely missing emails, which might be put down, however unconvincingly, to mere sloppiness.
...

There is much more.

The sloppiness excuse might have been otherwise persuasive  because events show she was actually a terrible manager who ignored red flags about the situation in Benghazi and Libya.  By redacting the material she got too cute.  Still her spokespersons are relentless in trying to spend some rationale for her deceit.  It is one of those Clinton qualities that never seems to go away even with advanced years.