When a lowly local reporter impertinently presented Her Majesty with specific questions about her improper email scheme, her eyes glazed over.  This again?  She side-stepped his questions, retreating to warmed-over, untrue talking points:

REPORTER: “Okay. I’m not going to ask you a trustworthiness question about the e-mail issue, but I do want to ask a judgment question. You used a small Denver company called Platte River Networks to manage your private server. It appears now that data off of that server got backed up to a cloud server somewhere else without your knowledge or consent. Platte River told me if it knew, and it’s not in the business of asking, but if it knew that you were planning to send State Department-type information through this system, this is not the system that they would have set you up with. You’re the nation’s top diplomat in that role, you’ve gotta know that what you’re sending through communications is valuable to foreign intelligence, why go with this system? Did any part of you think maybe this isn’t a good idea?”

CLINTON: “Well, look, I’ve taken responsibility for what I did, and it was a mistake. The State Department allowed it at the time. And I’ve tried to be as transparent as possible. I’ll be appearing before the Congress next week and answering a lot of questions that they may have, although, now it’s clear that this whole effort was set up for political partisan purposes, not to try to get to any useful end. But I’ll be in a position to respond and the American people can listen and watch and draw their own conclusions.”

REPORTER: “Yeah, but to someone who thinks that might have been a foolish move, what would you say about your judgment generally?”

CLINTON: “Well, nothing I sent or received was marked classified at the time. That is an absolute fact. It’s been verified over and over and over again. So I think that we’ll have a chance to explain what that means, if people don’t understand it.”

She’s “taken responsibility,” she says — albeit kicking and screaming, according to the New York Times. How authentic is that contrition? Her very next assertion is that her unsecure private server arrangement was “allowed.” No, it wasn’t.  Further, at no point has she “tried to be as transparent as possible.”  She kept the existence of her server a secret, resisted turning over emails until caving under pressure and court orders, only handed over the server itself when the FBI came knocking, and withheld relevant emails despite swearing under penalty of perjury that she hadn’t.  This is the antithesis of transparency.  Indeed, even many in the media and some Democrats concede that Occam’s Razor suggests the entire purpose of her server’s existence was to thwart transparency.  As for the “marked classified” parsing, I broke down the self-serving evolution on Hillary’s excuses on this front, each made necessary by the collapse of the last (video via Right Sightings):

From “no classified material” (false), to “no material that was classified at the time” (false), to “I didn’t send or receive the material personally” (false) to “it wasn’t *marked* classified at the time.” As I explain in the clip, this final distinction is meaningless. Under the law, it was her duty to recognize and protect classified information — and even the average layperson could instantly intuit that top secret details about North Korean nukes, or secret updates on the Iranian negotiations, or messages revealing the identity of a CIA asset in Libya very obviously constituted classified data, both at the time and ever since.  She is incapable of telling the truth on this issue because the truth could place her in further legal jeopardy.  Hillary Clinton, her “competitor” Bernie Sanders, and much of the Democratic base believes this is a non-issue that should go away.  Two Obama administration Inspectors General, the FBI, and most voters disagree.  Mrs. Clinton appears to have broken multiple rules — and possibly laws — while recklessly compromising national security, to protect her political ambitions.  And she’s lied about it.  Repeatedly.  I’ll leave you with this:

GOP Field vs. HRC in PA (PPP)

Carson +4
Christie +4
Rubio +3
Trump +2
Fiorina +1
Kasich -2
Jeb -5
Cruz -6
Santorum -8
Huckabee -9

— Liam Donovan (@LPDonovan) October 15, 2015

Editor’s note: This item is cross-posted at Townhall.com