Mills, in particular, has become a focal point of the current campaign, even though she is not officially a part of it and may never be. Like her former boss, Mills has come under criticism from some members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, in particular for what they characterize as her attempts to align talking points of various officials in the aftermath of the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound there. Mills, like Abedin, was given special-government-employee status, an affiliation that allowed her, at the end of her tenure at the State Department, to continue working on Haiti reconstruction as special envoy. The status permits people to work for the government while pursuing careers in the private sector; Senator Chuck Grassley, who heads the Judiciary Committee, has questioned Clinton’s use of the program. Mills’s e-mails with Clinton reveal a relationship far more egalitarian than is the case with other advisers. In one e-mail, Mills joked to Clinton about a video of her dancing: “You shake your tail feathers girl!” More than Abedin, Mills is an equal. She also has a long history with the Clintons. In 1999, as deputy counsel to the president, she became something of a star during the impeachment trial for defending Bill Clinton against allegations of obstruction of justice. “If you love the rule of law, you must love it in all of its applications,” she argued. “You cannot only love it when it provides the verdict you seek.”

Maggie Williams’s relationship dates back to the 1980s, when she was working at the Children’s Defense Fund and Clinton chaired the board. Williams served not only as Hillary’s chief of staff when she was First Lady but at the same time as an assistant to Bill Clinton. She was the first person to hold both positions at once. In 1995, in the middle of the congressional hearings on Whitewater, Williams had to testify about her actions in the immediate aftermath of Vince Foster’s suicide. A Secret Service officer claimed that he had seen Williams carrying folders out of Foster’s office the night he was found; a tearful Williams said she had not done so. In 1997, after Bill Clinton was re-elected, Williams got married and decided to take off for Paris with her husband, who would work at the U.S. Embassy there while she did communications consulting. But this didn’t mean a break with her former bosses. In the fall of 1997, Bill Clinton flew Williams and some others to Washington as a surprise for Hillary’s 50th birthday. And just a short while later, in 1999, Williams was back in the fold, along with a few other formerly burned-out Clinton aides, helping Clinton as part of the exploratory committee for her Senate campaign. Then, in the early 2000s, she worked for Bill again, managing his Clinton Foundation staff. After a short break, she returned in an attempt to salvage Hillary’s nose-diving 2008 presidential campaign. In June of 2014, Williams was named the director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

VI. “Fuck This Shit”

Hillary Clinton’s campaign spent the summer on its heels. In March 2015, when The New York Times reported on Clinton’s exclusive use of a private e-mail account while secretary of state, it must have looked to many in the campaign a lot like every other middling scandal that Hillaryland had ever dealt with. Her advisers seem to have a model that works for this kind of thing: (1) Make a strong legal case. (2) Come out guns blazing. (3) Don’t yield an inch.

The e-mail scandal is the perfect distillation of how Hillary’s wall of protection makes matters worse. Her exclusive use of the Clintons’ personal e-mail server while secretary of state appears born out of a defensive instinct for secrecy. The eye-rolling dismissiveness with which Clinton herself initially greeted the revelation, and the stonewalling nature of the response by her surrogates, have only fed the scandal more oxygen. Before Clinton began at the State Department, she and her aides arranged to create a private e-mail account on a server linked to her home in Chappaqua. An Obama-administration official whose tenure coincided with Clinton’s at the State Department empathized with Hillary. “I understand why she did this. We are targeted all the time in the U.S. government, and there is no more vulnerable feeling than putting your thoughts on a government e-mail.” In July, the Office of Personnel Management said that two major breaches last year of U.S.-government databases potentially compromised sensitive information involving at least 22 million federal employees and contractors, together with their families and friends. “If you are Hillary Clinton and coming into government, of course she would use a personal e-mail account,” this administration official said. When she finally handed over the e-mails, she likely “erased stuff to protect her kid or her husband. Maybe she doesn’t want her J. Crew size out there. Everything she did is actually human-scale stuff and totally relatable. It may not be completely on the level, but it’s completely relatable.” But that’s not the problem, this official said. “It’s all the obfuscating and the ‘Fuck this shit’ attitude.” That said, it’s worth noting that other government employees manage to maintain a personal account for personal matters and a government account for official business. Clinton has come to acknowledge that the use of a private e-mail account was something she regretted. She has also said that she is sorry that some people have found her actions “confusing.” She finally got around to plain-old sorry in September, but only after months of saying she did nothing wrong.