Asked to explain what he had intended by the world careless, Comey explained that it was a commonsense term, meant to convey “real sloppiness.” To pretend otherwise is to persist in the pattern that Clinton has followed from virtually the moment she became a national figure in her husband’s first presidential campaign. Over the past quarter century she has all too often offered up pained and partial answers to controversies, too often seeming to hide more than she is willing to reveal, only to find that again and again, the issue blows up in her face.

The pattern is unmistakable, from the Whitewater inquiry (when she resisted disclosing documents about a failed Arkansas land deal), to her 10,000 percent profits in commodity trades (which she explained by saying she’d read The Wall Street Journal), to the Rose Law Firm billing records (which infamously and mysteriously turned up in the White House residence after she’d said they were missing), to the Monica Lewinsky affair and the State Department emails themselves…

As first lady, Clinton more than once dispatched aides to disseminate information that turned out to be incomplete, misleading or plain wrong. In her perpetual determination never to be seen as having done anything wrong, she all too often left the unmistakable impression that she had. In a trivial but telling example of her resistance to scrutiny, it was Clinton who caused an uproar in the White House press corps at the beginning of her husband’s administration when she ordered that reporters be barred from a corridor outside the Press Secretary’s office, lest they bump into the president coming from the Oval Office just steps away.

In her first memoir, Living History, Clinton recounted bursting into angry tears and gasping for breath when her husband first confessed the Lewinsky affair. But many people who knew the president all too well were gasping for breath – in disbelief at his denials – on the day allegations of the affair first surfaced. With the rarest exceptions – her teary eyes in New Hampshire in the 2008 campaign when asked by a voter how she carried on – Clinton’s most confessional moments have a sanitized air, as if she has carefully scrubbed them for public consumption,