Time to own the story

If you could time-travel, maybe you’d ride the Nile with Cleopatra, or trade quips with Ben Franklin. Not us. We’d love to parachute into the meeting several years ago when someone in Hillary Clinton’s world said it would be swell to run all of her emails through a private server, separate from State Department computers. Another hot ticket: the day in 2014 when someone in the same circle said it would be similarly swell for Team Clinton to decide which emails to delete and which ones to surrender.

Irony of ironies: Those decisions, neither adequately explained, unwittingly have deprived Clinton of the very privacy she evidently sought. Her email debacle doesn’t merely threaten, at least for now, her once almost-assured nomination as the Democratic candidate for president. It also exposes her communications to scrutiny in ways most Americans would hope never happens to them. Who wants the world reading his or her emails?

This week alone, four developments combined to demonstrate that what started with questions about Clinton’s attention to government email rules also is exposing her judgment to scrutiny. She’s not accused of any wrongdoing. But the cost to her campaign is severe. According to a Bloomberg Politics poll released Wednesday, 33 percent of registered Democrats and Americans who lean Democratic want her to be president. Sen. Bernie Sanders is the choice of 24 percent, and Vice President Joe Biden, who isn’t even a candidate, is favored by 25 percent. Those four developments: —Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the FBI has recovered from Clinton’s server an unknown share of the emails that she said had been deleted. The anonymously sourced story said the FBI “is investigating how and why classified information ended up on Clinton’s server,” and added, “once the emails have been extracted, a group of agents has been separating personal correspondence and passing along work-related messages to agents leading the investigation.” The New York Times added that “one official said it had not been very hard for the FBI to recover the messages.”

—The Washington Post reported that “State Department officials provided new information Tuesday that undercuts Clinton’s characterization” that she had turned over her work-related emails in response to a routine-sounding records request to several former secretaries of state.

—Politico reported Tuesday that “more previously undisclosed State Department emails related to Benghazi have surfaced in a federal court filing, offering a public accounting of at least some of the records still being sought by congressional investigators.” Expect the contents of those emails to be discussed Oct. 22 when Clinton appears before a House committee exploring the attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Libya.

—As noted above, one of several judges wrestling with records of Clinton-era documents appears increasingly impatient with State’s pace of disclosure. Among the concerns: why State missed a court-ordered deadline of Sept. 13 to complete searches of emails provided by two of Clinton’s closest aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin.

We’ve noted before that Clinton’s defenses have repeatedly turned out to be implausible, incomplete, doubtful or just wrong. Her apologies have been rote, contained, perfunctory. Rather than boldly taking ownership of her email decisions, she acts as if this fiasco—with its implications for the security of U.S. secrets—just happened to her.

Clinton could demonstrate the good decision-making she hasn’t thus far by taking time from her campaign to fully explain to Americans what she was thinking, how she and her associates relied on a personal server for official business, and why she flouted the policies not only of her own State Department but also of President Barack Obama.

It’s no longer just the emails. It’s the judgment. Secretary Clinton, own this.