A reminder from a rather unusual source that the apple does not fall far from the tree, politically speaking. Gawker’s John Cook told C-SPAN’s Washington Journal this morning that the main issue with Hillary Clinton’s attempt to evade oversight and accountability through the exclusive use of a private e-mail system was that it circumvented the law. That “scheme” goes directly to the top, Cook argues, as Barack Obama “tolerated” Hillary’s evasion of the “Freedom of Information law,” not a guideline or rule. “It goes not just to Hillary Clinton,” Cook states, “it goes to Barack Obama and his hypocrisy, and failed, false commitment to transparency.”

Cook gets to the heart of the scandal and corruption, with one exception at the end:

It’s true that overclassification is an ongoing problem, and it’s one that’s been exacerbated by the Obama administration rather than addressed. This, however, is something entirely different. The evasion of FOIA actions didn’t come from a governmental impulse to overclassify documents to keep them from being viewed by the media or public advocacy groups. Hillary Clinton hid these communications from the government itself in order to personally evade and frustrate the Freedom of Information Act, for her own political purposes.

Barack Obama and his White House participated in that fraud, at least tacitly, no matter how much his team tries to spin it now. It prompts the question of whether Obama and his team had as much to gain as Hillary in conveniently losing a large part of the historical record on the foreign policy of his first term as President.

The issue of Hillary’s secrecy and her records isn’t new either, as liberal-leaning ProPublica reminds us today too. They’ve assembled their top five public battles waged by Hillary over the production of records, which serves to show us that this is a pattern — one very likely to continue if she wins office again in the future. This pattern goes all the way back to the first national Clinton campaign:

1) 1992: The Commodity Trades

During Bill Clinton’s first run for the White House, his campaign declined to release all of the couple’s tax returns. Later it emerged that the campaign had weighed requests from the press and decided not to do so, because a few of the returns showed Hillary Clinton’s spectacular success in commodities trading, in which she made almost $100,000 from an initial investment of $1,000 in a matter of months for a return of almost 10,000 percent. Hillary Clinton threatened a campaign lawyer who had access to the material with retribution if she released the data: “You’ll never work in Democratic politics again,” the lawyer, Loretta Lynch, says Clinton told her.  It wasn’t until 1994, as the New York Times prepared to publish an article detailing the trades, that the Clintons made public the returns.

This is not the same Loretta Lynch that is waiting to be confirmed for Attorney General, by the way, so that’s not the story here. What is the story is that Hillary Clinton has spent the last 23 years trying to hide her tracks, sometimes using intimidation and threats to do so, with apparent impunity. One could argue that she hasn’t learned from the past, but given her current status in the 2016 race, it’s clear that Democrats haven’t learned their lesson about the Clintons, especially Hillary. Let’s hope the general electorate has tired of these antics enough to put an end to the Clinton era for good.