Yesterday, the State Department released a new tranche of e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server, and it certainly provided plenty of amusement for people on social media. It included plenty of insight into office politics at State during Hillary’s tenure, including this obsequious exercise in extolling the “Secretary of Awesome”:

https://twitter.com/NoahCRothman/status/627174776516292608

Or the mundane:

Darn it, now we'll never know what DiFI likes to eat pic.twitter.com/NApB6PvVIA

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) July 31, 2015

Sometimes the sycophancy extended beyond the State Department. In this case, NBC News staff passed along a heads-up on what was supposed to be a tough question for Hillary on Meet the Press:

How your Sunday TV gets made pic.twitter.com/bialQhYKES

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) July 31, 2015

However, there were more than a few instances of these:

State redacted a new Clinton email as "confidential" for containing sensitive/confidential foreign gov info pic.twitter.com/8wxcyB2Dr5

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) July 31, 2015

In fact, State and the intelligence community had to classify and redact data in dozens of e-mails in this tranche alone, thanks to the transmission of classified material through Hillary’s server. Reuters, however, misreports the significance:

Dozens of emails on the private email account that Hillary Clinton used when secretary of state were recently classified by the government, the State Department said on Friday, giving Republican critics more ammunition against the Democratic presidential hopeful.

The emails, released by the State Department under a judge’s order, date from the early period of Clinton’s 2009-2013 tenure as the United State’s top diplomat.

Many of them were heavily redacted and marked as “confidential” only this week before they were made public, meaning that Clinton was not aware when she sent or received them that their content might later be regarded as classified.

No, that’s not why they were classified and redacted only this week. State and the IGs only recently saw these e-mails, thanks to Hillary’s decision not to use secured government systems for communications. The classification dates reflect the time at which they were reviewed and checked, not when the data itself was considered classified. It only pertains to the classification of the e-mails themselves (as separate documents), and not to the data within them or when they would have been classified.

There is no excuse for this misreporting, either. Two IGs, in their referral to the Department of Justice on this issue, noted that the material was classified when it went through the Clintonemail server, but that it was not properly marked as such nor handled in any kind of secure manner. The data that was redacted for being classified was “classified when they were sent and are classified now,” a point made by the IGs a full week before this Reuters report.

As I noted yesterday, every redaction from the State Department’s release is another instance in which material was improperly sent through unsecured channels. We’ve become used to seeing redactions in other production of government communications, but those instances involve communications through secure and approved channels. Hillary’s private e-mail was not only unapproved and unsecured, it was deliberately set up to avoid the kind of oversight that official channels allow. That means every redaction and post-transmission classification is a potential violation of the law.

That may not be the only legal problem she faces, either, as Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports today:

A federal judge has ordered the State Department to ask Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to certify under penalty of perjury that she has turned over some of the work-related emails she kept on a private server during the four years she served as secretary of state.

U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan issued the order Friday in connection with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the conservative group Judicial Watch filed in 2013 seeking records about the employment status of Clinton aide Huma Abedin, who worked as Clinton’s deputy chief of staff but later transferred to a part-time job as a so-called “special government employee.”

The State Department told Judicial Watch last year that all records about the arrangement had been disclosed, but after Clinton’s use of a private email account for official business was revealed earlier this year, Judicial Watch moved to reopen the lawsuit. Abedin was also revealed to have used an account on the same server.

Sullivan’s order is just the latest in a flurry of legal moves turning up the heat on Clinton over the email controversy. Another federal judge who is handling a FOIA lawsuit brought by the Associated Press, Richard Leon, has repeatedly lashed out at the department over its handing of requests for Clinton’s records. State now faces about 30 lawsuits seeking some or all of the Clinton emails and playing out in front of a variety of different judges.

If her name was anything but Hillary Clinton, she’d be spending her time planning her legal defense rather than running for President. Her fellow Democrats had better hope that she continues to get a pass, but it’s going to be a big gamble. Michael Ramirez hits the mark, as usual, in this editorial cartoon from Investors Business Daily:

Also, be sure to check out Ramirez’ terrific collection of his works: Everyone Has the Right to My Opinion, which covers the entire breadth of Ramirez’ career, and it gives fascinating look at political history.  Read my review here, and watch my interviews with Ramirez here and here.  And don’t forget to check out the entire Investors.com site, which has now incorporated all of the former IBD Editorials, while individual investors still exist.