We already know that the real reason Hillary Clinton wasn’t indicted for her illegal handling of classified information is likely that Barack Obama himself would have been implicated. He emailed her at least 18 times, using a pseudonym in some of them, and then lied to the American people about it, saying he only found out about her private email system “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

Thanks to the WikiLeaks dump of Clinton campaign communications, we now know her team knew this was a major problem and shifted quickly to spin mode. Soon after Obama’s lie, Clinton campaign secretary Josh Scherwin emailed Jennifer Palmieri and other Clinton campaign staffers: “Jen, you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.” One of the other staffers, Nick Merrill, forwarded that email to Cheryl Mills and others. Mills later emailed John Podesta, saying, “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.” I.e., Obama lied and Clinton’s crew had to cover it up.

But even before Obama’s lie, Clinton’s campaign was trying to figure out what to do about the emails between Obama and Clinton. Podesta suggested in one email that executive privilege was the get-out-of-jail card: “Think we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege.” Which would have been hilariously hypocritical after Obama had just boasted of his administration’s transparency.

Obama avoided claiming “executive privilege” per se, but his Justice Department and FBI also short-circuited an actual grand-jury investigation of Clinton’s email, which would have obviated his privilege. Either way, he and Clinton walk free.