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Hillary Clinton E-Mail Alibi Is Strikingly Inconvenient

The former secretary of state has repeatedly argued that she used a private server to conduct government business out of "convenience."
Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers remarks during a campaign stop at Dr. William U. Pearson Community Center on August 18, 2015 in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Democratic presidential candidate and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivers remarks during a campaign stop at Dr. William U. Pearson Community Center on August 18, 2015 in North Las Vegas, Nevada.

Photographer: Isaac Brekken

For more than five months, Hillary Clinton has been saying that she used a private server and e-mail address as secretary of state purely as a matter of convenience. And her critics, of course, keep expressing skepticism about whether that was her true motivation: Surely, she was instead hiding something—or at best, just keeping her Spidey skills up.

Now, with the Justice Department looking into whether classified information was handled correctly, it may be time for the Democratic presidential front-runner to stop presenting herself as someone whose personal convenience is so paramount that potential security concerns never even occurred to her. Or as someone who, as her communications director Jennifer Palmieri said on With All Due Respect last week, “really didn’t think it through.”