Hillary Clinton’s tangled web of lies about her private server for official emails just got snagged by a State Department release of information.  This may be the beginning of throwing her under the bus to protect the institutional interests at Foggy Bottom.  She has sought to portray her private server used for all official business as comparable to the occasional use of private email accounts by other secretaries of state.  But this glosses over the key fact that she was able to keep official business away from Freedom of Information Act disclosures and, not so incidentally, away from scrutiny by other State Department officials.

As the Washington Post puts it (avoiding harsh terms like "lie"):

Hillary Rodham Clinton has described her decision last year to turn over thousands of work-related e-mails as a response to a routine-sounding records request.

“When we were asked to help the State Department make sure they had everything from other secretaries of state, not just me, I’m the one who said, ‘Okay, great, I will go through them again,’ ” Clinton said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “And we provided all of them.”

But State Department officials provided new information Tuesday that undercuts Clinton’s characterization. They said the request was not simply about general rec­ord-keeping but was prompted entirely by the discovery that Clinton had exclusively used a private e-mail system. They also said they first contacted her in the summer of 2014, at least three months before the agency asked Clinton and three of her predecessors to provide their e-mails.

“In the process of responding to congressional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said in a statement e-mailed to The Washington Post. “State Department officials contacted her representatives during the summer of 2014 to learn more about her email use and the status of emails in that account.”

Kirby added that the agency then recognized “that we similarly did not have extensive email records from prior Secretaries of State and therefore included them when we requested their records in October 2014.”

So why would Hillary lie about this?  Clearly, because she wanted to minimize the seriousness of her use of a private server, and the entire decision to take the risky decision to use an unsafe server to for highly classified material.

The other interesting question is why the State Department chose to reveal this information now.  This is speculation, but with revelations that the supposedly "private" emails are being recovered by the FBI, and that hacking almost certainly took place, the State Department may be protecting itself in anticipation of the fan getting seriously soiled.

Is the State Department throwing Hillary under the bus?  It sort of looks that way.  Stay tuned.