Hours before The New York Times broke the story that Hillary Clinton had set up what turned out to be an unauthorized and unsecure private email server to conduct official business while serving as our top diplomat, a State Department official was in contact with the Clinton campaign—offering the official response from the department over the article. The interactions will most certainly draw conclusions that State and the Clinton campaign were colluding to get ahead of the impending blowback.

Clinton campaign chair John Podesta was caught in an email exchange, courtesy of Wikileaks, with Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s former chief of staff at State, about dumping those emails. Podesta claims he meant that the emails should be released in a document dump, but they were erased via Bleachbit while under a federal subpoena that was issued on March 4, 2015. The Times reported on Clinton’s email server on March 2, 2015. The State Department said that in order to ensure accurate information was being released to the public, some communication with the Clinton camp was necessary. Fine, but it also appears that State agreed to change part of their response at the request of the Clinton campaign (via AP):