Well, now we find this out. A Judicial Watch request of the State Department to turn over Hillary Clinton’s emails pertaining to the Benghazi scandal secured thousands of them. It’s just that the State Department wasn’t eager to cooperate. Notably, one email was missing: a Sept. 29, 2012, message that was insignificant except that it came from Hillary’s private email server.

​Leaving this important piece of information out of the pile of emails released by the State Department may have given Clinton time to figure out just what emails were “private” and which would be safe for public consumption from this server, the existence of which wasn’t revealed until several months afterward. In this case, the items making the narrative that Hillary wasn’t doing anything wrong were the ones deemed okay for release.

And because Barack Obama’s and Clinton’s efforts to make Benghazi about a video rather than an al-Qaida attack worked so well with the Leftmedia that we were saddled with Obama’s second term, this full-court press will be to minimize the damage to Hillary’s 2016 plans. You’ll notice that this story has been missing from the nightly television news or the major newspapers along the Washington-New York axis. It’s met with a collective yawn about being an old story because covering Donald Trump’s latest tweet is so much more exciting.

Moreover, coordinating Clinton’s defense seems to be the new avocation of her former employer, the State Department. More questions are arising over the role they’re playing in the scandal, and how much they’re doing to protect Clinton. “Now we know the Obama administration consciously refused to give up key information about Hillary Clinton’s email in 2014,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “It covered up this email both from the court and Judicial Watch.”

As we’ve been saying all along, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy sums it up, “Clinton’s purpose [in having a private email server] was to escape accountability for her flawed judgment and actions. To achieve it, she quite intentionally circumvented federal laws that require government officials to maintain accessible records and disclose them to the public, Congress, and the courts.”

Added McCarthy, “That such a person could be a plausible major-party candidate for president is an appalling commentary on the state of our nation.” Indeed, and given the trend of recent polls against the GOP frontrunner, she may soon be in the position to pardon herself.

Unless she’s indicted before the election, in which case a Clinton-Warren ticket might become a Biden-Warren one.