Now that Libya has descend­ed into chaos, Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­den­tial front-run­ner Hillary Clin­ton is at pains to dis­pel the notion that, as sec­re­tary of state, she led the U.S. inter­ven­tion that top­pled dic­ta­tor Muam­mar Gaddafi in 2011.

The Clinton of 2012 saw herself as a principal agent in forging the very resolution that the Clinton of 2015 cites as a turning point in her thinking.

Yet the lat­est tranche of emails from Clinton’s pri­vate serv­er, released by the State Depart­ment on Octo­ber 30, shows there’s one indi­vid­ual who would strong­ly object to those efforts: the Hillary Clin­ton of 2011 and 2012.

A report in June by the New York Times revealed that in August 2011, Clinton’s advi­sors had urged her to take cred­it for what was then seen as a mil­i­tary suc­cess in Libya. Now, the new­ly released emails show that the for­mer sec­re­tary of state was her­self intent on empha­siz­ing her key role in the affair — and that her team used cozy rela­tion­ships with the media to help her do so.

In one exchange, on April 4, 2012, a frus­trat­ed Clin­ton com­plains to her staffers that they’d omit­ted a num­ber of key details in a time­line titled ​“Sec­re­tary Clinton’s lead­er­ship on Libya.” The time­line, which aims to show that Clin­ton ​“was instru­men­tal in secur­ing the autho­riza­tion, build­ing the coali­tion and tight­en­ing the noose around Qad­hafi [sic] and his régime,” would lat­er be pro­vid­ed to media.

“Did I meet in Paris w Jabril [sic] (brought to hotel by BHL) on 3⁄ 14 ? It’s not on time­line,” she writes in the April 4 email, refer­ring to Mah­moud Jib­ril, the prime min­is­ter for Libya’s Nation­al Tran­si­tion­al Coun­cil dur­ing the country’s civ­il war, and Bernard-Hen­ri Lévy (BHL), the French philoso­pher who helped dri­ve France’s own involve­ment in the con­flict. In fact, Clinton’s meet­ing with Jib­ril was list­ed on the orig­i­nal time­line pro­duced by advi­sor Jacob Sul­li­van, sug­gest­ing Clin­ton was either refer­ring to a dif­fer­ent ver­sion of the time­line or, more like­ly, failed to see it on the document.

“This time­line is total­ly inad­e­quate (which both­ers me about our record­keep­ing),” Clin­ton writes three min­utes lat­er. ​“For exam­ple, I was in Paris on 3⁄ 19 when attack start­ed. That’s not on time­line. What else is miss­ing? Pls go over it asap.” Twen­ty-three min­utes lat­er, Sul­li­van sent Clin­ton an updat­ed ver­sion of the time­line with the March 19 inci­dent added in.

Clin­ton emailed her advi­sors twice more with­in six min­utes, say­ing, ​“What both­ers me is that S/P [the State Department’s Bureau of Pol­i­cy Plan­ning staff] pre­pared the time­line but it does­n’t include much of what I did.” Among the items that were left out, she notes phone calls and meet­ings with Arab offi­cials, as well as her role in secur­ing a March 12 Arab League res­o­lu­tion, which called for a U.N.-imposed no-fly zone over Libya.

The emails also reveal that Clinton’s team was feed­ing infor­ma­tion to the media to push the nar­ra­tive she is now con­test­ing: that she was the chief force behind inter­ven­tion in Libya.

In the same email chain, Clin­ton com­plains, ​“The Joby War­rick piece from 10/30/11 includes more detail than our own time­line.” She is refer­ring to a Wash­ing­ton Post arti­cle that details Clinton’s ​“piv­otal role” in forg­ing and main­tain­ing the alliance of inter­ven­ing coun­tries through ​“her mix­ture of polit­i­cal prag­ma­tism and tenacity.”

How­ev­er, Clinton’s team quick­ly assures her that Warrick’s piece was as thor­ough as it was because the State Depart­ment had dili­gent­ly fur­nished him with the nec­es­sary information:

The com­pre­hen­sive tick tock Jake put togeth­er … was done in large part for the War­rick piece. The great detail Joby had came entire­ly from Jake. Joby didn’t do any inde­pen­dent research.

This sug­gests the time­line was pro­vid­ed to the Post to serve as the basis for the piece. Addi­tion­al­ly, the fact that Clin­ton is ran­kled that the article’s exten­sive detail out­does the time­line, and her staff’s sub­se­quent assur­ance that Sul­li­van was the source of this behind-the-scenes detail on Clinton’s lead­er­ship, implies that Sul­li­van — now one of Clinton’s top advi­sors for her pres­i­den­tial cam­paign — may have been one of the name­less State Depart­ment offi­cials cit­ed by Warrick.

A com­par­i­son of the arti­cle and the time­line reveals their sim­i­lar­i­ties. The Post piece fol­lows vir­tu­al­ly the same pro­gres­sion as the time­line pre­pared for Clin­ton. Both cov­er her arrival in Paris on March 14 and her sub­se­quent meet­ings with the G8 and Mah­moud Jib­ril; her work to secure the March 17 Unit­ed Nations Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion autho­riz­ing a no-fly zone in Libya (as well as Russ­ian absten­tion on that vote); her efforts to con­vince Qatar, Jor­dan and the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates to pro­vide their air­pow­er in the con­flict; and her role in press­ing more than 20 nations to rec­og­nize the Libyan Nation­al Tran­si­tion­al Coun­cil as the country’s legit­i­mate government.

The piece also leans heav­i­ly on uniden­ti­fied State Depart­ment offi­cials and aides who ​“described the administration’s inner work­ings on the con­di­tion of anonymi­ty.” One, described as a ​“senior State Depart­ment offi­cial,” notes that, despite receiv­ing no instruc­tions from the White House to sup­port Libyan inter­ven­tion upon arriv­ing in Paris, Clin­ton ​“began to see a way for­ward” by her own initiative.

This is all a far cry from the Clin­ton of today, who tends to paint her­self as just one of many push­ing for an inter­ven­tion — and stress­es that Pres­i­dent Oba­ma made the final decision.

For instance, in her 2014 mem­oir, Hard Choic­es, pub­lished long after con­di­tions in Libya had dete­ri­o­rat­ed, Clin­ton por­trays her­self as reluc­tant to push for mil­i­tary action until the March 12 Arab League res­o­lu­tion ​“changed the cal­cu­lus.” Like­wise, in both the Octo­ber 13 Demo­c­ra­t­ic debate and her tes­ti­mo­ny to the House Com­mit­tee on Beng­hazi in Octo­ber 22, she point­ed to the Arab League’s ​“unprece­dent­ed” res­o­lu­tion as a key rea­son she sup­port­ed intervention.

Yet Clinton’s emails sug­gest that she saw her own work on the res­o­lu­tion as a crit­i­cal ele­ment in ​“secur­ing the autho­riza­tion” for force on Libya. In oth­er words, the Clin­ton of 2012 saw her­self as a prin­ci­pal agent in forg­ing the very res­o­lu­tion that the Clin­ton of 2015 cites as a turn­ing point in her thinking.

Fur­ther­more, over the last few years, Clin­ton has tend­ed to lay the deci­sion to go into Libya square­ly at Obama’s feet. Clin­ton says in her mem­oir that ​“the pres­i­dent decid­ed to move for­ward with draw­ing up mil­i­tary plans and secur­ing a UN Secu­ri­ty Coun­cil res­o­lu­tion,” rhetor­i­cal­ly remov­ing her­self from the equa­tion. Like­wise, in response to a ques­tion by Peter Roskam (R‑IL) dur­ing the lat­est Beng­hazi hear­ing about whether she ​“per­suad­ed Pres­i­dent Oba­ma to inter­vene mil­i­tar­i­ly” in Libya, Clin­ton stressed that ​“there were many in the State Depart­ment” in favor of inter­ven­tion, and point­ed­ly stat­ed that, ​“at the end of the day, this was the president’s decision.”

Yet the time­line pro­duced by Clinton’s own team calls her ​“a lead­ing voice for strong UNSC action and a NATO civil­ian pro­tec­tion mis­sion” and has her secur­ing ​“Russ­ian absten­tion and Por­tuguese and African sup­port for UNSC 1973 [which autho­rized a no-fly zone over Libya], ensur­ing that it pass­es.” More­over, the Post arti­cle that Clinton’s aides helped influ­ence paints her as the decid­ing fac­tor in Obama’s deci­sion to inter­vene. ​“The pres­i­dent,” the arti­cle states, ​“who had been weigh­ing argu­ments from a sharply divid­ed Cab­i­net for sev­er­al days, sided with his sec­re­tary of state,” who had become a ​“strong advo­cate” for inter­ven­tion by the time she spoke with Oba­ma on March 15, accord­ing to an anony­mous ​“admin­is­tra­tion official.”

These emails also raise ques­tions about the rela­tion­ship between admin­is­tra­tion offi­cials and the media. The estab­lish­ment press has been crit­i­cized in the past for hav­ing cozy rela­tion­ships with those in pow­er, as well as an over­re­liance on anony­mous admin­is­tra­tion sources, which allows offi­cials to broad­cast their pre­ferred ver­sion of events with­out fac­ing cri­tique or ques­tion­ing. The New York Times’ Pub­lic Edi­tor Mar­garet Sul­li­van has not­ed crit­i­cism of such report­ing being lit­tle bet­ter than ​“stenog­ra­phy” that ​“takes at face val­ue what gov­ern­ment offi­cials say,” and that the Times’ own style­book advis­es reporters to use anonymi­ty as a ​“last resort.”

This wasn’t the only time Clinton’s staffers would work with media out­lets behind the scenes to prop­a­gate a nar­ra­tive that ben­e­fit­ed them. As report­ed last month by this mag­a­zine, an email to Clinton’s staff by then-Assis­tant Sec­re­tary for Pub­lic Affairs Michael Ham­mer cel­e­brat­ed a June 30, 2011, New York Times edi­to­r­i­al urg­ing NATO not to give up in Libya and ​“stand firm­ly with the rebels.” Ham­mer told them that the State Depart­ment had arranged for then-Ambas­sador to Libya Gene Cretz to give NYT For­eign Affairs Edi­tor Car­ol Gia­co­mo ​“more ammo” for the op-ed. Telling­ly, he added: ​“We’re doing more of this engage­ment with the edi­to­r­i­al writ­ers. Go team!” That piece made no men­tion of the con­ver­sa­tion with Cretz. Oth­er reports have also not­ed the Clin­ton team’s mas­sag­ing of the media on oth­er subjects.

As oth­ers have point­ed out, despite Repub­li­cans’ attempts to use the Beng­hazi Com­mit­tee to eat into Clinton’s poll num­bers, the real scan­dal involv­ing Clin­ton and Libya is her full-throat­ed sup­port for a war that has left the North African nation a chaot­ic breed­ing ground for ter­ror­ism. Clin­ton may attempt to run away from her lega­cy in Libya, but she can’t out­run her own words.