The FBI has released still more notes on the investigation of Hillary Clinton, this time impugning the way State Department went through tens of thousands of emails she hid from the public for years. State is supposed to operate transparently but clearly had only two priorities — to cover its own backside, and to cover hers.

The FBI notes reveal suspicions about unnamed personnel at State assigned to vet the emails for release. The work history of some of them "appeared to create a conflict of interest," say the notes. One had been "possibly involved" in the IRS scandal, in which conservative nonprofit applicants were targeted for harassment.

Given that, their work product was what you'd expect. The names of officials were improperly whited out to protect them. At the same time, career government staff were put under pressure to avoid national security redactions, especially in the Benghazi-related communications that had to be handed over to Congress.

State's top brass lobbied against classified redactions, and wanted, illegally, to pretend that redactions made to conceal classified information were actually due to something other than national secrecy. Why? Because every redaction based on national secrecy was an admission that Clinton lied when she claimed never to have received classified information on her private, unsecured email system. In fact, there was far too much classified information on her server to allow that subterfuge to work.

Undersecretary Patrick Kennedy was last in the news for covering up for a U.S. ambassador accused of sex crimes against minor children, which is not just a heinous act but also a potential breach of national security. Another part of Kennedy's job is to oversee State Department record-keeping. In that role, he campaigned vigorously to stop the FBI classifying at least one sensitive Benghazi email. Then he did something that really reveals the ugly, corrupt way that federal fiefdoms work. In exchange for protecting Clinton, he offered to grant a previously-denied FBI request to send more personnel to Iraq. That "quid quo pro," as Kennedy described it in an email, never occurred, but the fact that it was made is illustrative of how Washington so frequently works against the public when it is supposed to work for them. A senior official offered to subvert an agency decision if the FBI would muddy the waters to protect the official's powerful patron.

Finally, two curious things happened at the end of State's vetting process. First, 2 of 14 boxes filled with Clinton emails simply disappeared. The other 12 boxes, containing 52,455 pages, were simply packed into boxes "with no folders or known method of organization." This is similar to the way Clinton's private staff had originally handed over her emails — analog, disorganized, non-searchable — to make them as hard for Congress to untangle as possible. It was part of a long-term stalling effort undertaken to avoid sluicing evidence into a scandal that could destroy Clinton during the primaries and upset Democratic plans for her coronation next January.

Given all the State Department did and does to drag out its legal obligation to transparency, it's not surprising that Team Clinton believed that State would release just one percent of her emails or less. Team Clinton discussed this in private, while publicly claiming it had urged State to release them all.

The public needs to ponder why an entire government agency dedicated itself to riding shotgun for the presidential candidate most likely to win. Perhaps Clinton's habitual secrecy, paranoia and dishonesty infected the State Department under her tenure there. Either way, it certainly shares those characteristics with her.

Clinton isn't president yet, but already her poison has seeped into the federal bureaucracy. How much worse will it get next year if voters are rash enough to elect her to the presidency?