Hillary Clinton is desperately trying to rid herself of this email scandal that’s been dogging her for weeks, collapsing her campaign. After all, in order to fully launch “Hillary 2.0,” the kinder, gentler, more transparent software update she’s been pledging, she has to leave all her problems behind her.

The most effective approach would probably be the simplest one: apologize, turn over the emails and allow authorities to comb through them, taking responsibility for whatever problems might arise, and then allowing the media to provide you with enough favorable coverage to ride out the drama without serving any time. But Hillary Clinton will always be a Clinton, and so cannot resist covering her own pantsuited behind with a host of excuses — the only things that are truly transparent about her response.

Late last night on Facebook, Hillary Clinton posted this defense of her email use:

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She’s very sorry, but mostly if you were confused about how she handled this “non-issue” in the first place. Next time, she’ll try to explain things slower and at a higher volume. 

The link goes to her campaign website, where she’s posted “four sentences” for supporters to regurgitate in response to questions about Hillary’s basement email server. They are, in a way, supposed to be a comprehensive response to any allegations of wrongdoing, but somehow, I doubt they’ll hold up in court.

1. Hillary takes responsibility for her decision to use a personal account, and the challenges it has created.
2. Her use of a private email account was allowed under State Department rules.
3. Nothing she sent or received was marked classified.
4. She provided all of her work-related emails to the State Department.

This is probably supposed to be like the back page of Highlights magazine. Spot the obvious errors! Circle them in crayon! And then silently bemoan the state of affairs in this country, knowing, deep in your heart, that there are literally thousands of people who take these sentences at face value. Let’s parse them out, shall we?

1. Hillary takes responsibility for her decision to use a personal account, and the challenges it has created.

I don’t know about her personal responsibility, but the account wasn’t just a personal account. It’s not like Clinton was forwarding her State Department communications through to her Hotmail account. She set up a separate, private, unsecured server in her basement so that she could keep every communication she had as an official of the Federal government safe from the prying eyes of her American constituents. She knew that if she routed all of her email to her own, privately-owned server she could avoid transparency laws, FOIA request and the burden of having to turn over all of her work to the people who pay her salary.

2. Her use of a private email account was allowed under State Department rules.

Here’s where we come up with the classic Clinton language-parsing. Yes, private email accounts are allowed under State Department rules. But you’re not supposed to use them for State Department business. You certainly can’t use them to send classified information to and from other people with high-level security clearances, and you definitely can’t use them exclusively for all official communication. Anyone who has ever worked for any sort of company that values intellectual property knows the basic reason for this — using a secure, proprietary server that IT can monitor keeps your data safe. You can usually still use a private email account, but it’s easier — and safer — to keep everything together. The State Department also, reportedly, required the email to be secure, whether you used it for official business or not. Obviously, Hillary’s wasn’t.

3. Nothing she sent or received was marked classified.

This is demonstrably untrue. Even what little the State Department has released show that Clinton transacted in classified information regularly. She and her team didn’t acknowledge that certain information was classified, and may have even had a secret suicide pact to pretend that the “classified” tag wasn’t an option (she certainly never used it for reasons that are pretty clear), but almost uniformly, investigating parties have noted classified information passed through Clinton’s hands and basement email server. 

4. She provided all of her work-related emails to the State Department.

It’s been well established that this is as much of a mystery to the State Department as it is to anyone else. She certainly gave about 50,000 emails to the Benghazi select committee, but there’s no proof what she provided is in any way comprehensive. She reportedly deleted 31,000 emails before handing over what little she did manage to eek out to Congress. And that’s for the server we know about. There could have been other servers. There could have even been other email addresses. Just because the “controversy” centers around a single server and motivated mostly by a single issue, the death of an ambassador in Libya, that doesn’t mean the problem is limited to one, specific instance. 

By the end, that got a little paranoid, but you know what I mean. She’d be better off referencing “four sentences” as the punishment she’ll narrowly avoid.