Hillary Clinton’s history with Republican-instigated criminal investigations has led her to be excessively defensive. Here is a brief excerpt from an article by Jeffrey Toobin for The New Yorker. To read the complete article, check out other material, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for President is widely, and aptly, described as historic. Here’s one of the reasons: If she wins, she will have spent a longer time under criminal investigation than any President in history. Why is this? Is she uniquely corrupt? Unduly targeted?

The answers are less than straightforward. The appropriate analysis, it seems, is a political riff on Bayes’s theorem. Clinton’s behavior, and the responses to it, have continued to evolve in reaction to unfolding events.

Clinton’s first experience with a criminal investigation came with Whitewater, the name given to various activities centered around a money-losing land deal that she and her husband invested in during the nineteen-eighties. Republican (and journalistic) claims of illegality in connection with the investment led to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Robert Fiske, in 1994. Fiske quickly cleared the Clintons of allegations of wrongdoing that had arisen in connection with an earlier investigation of Whitewater, as well as in the suicide of their friend and colleague Vincent Foster. Shortly after Fiske’s report, however, the court in charge of the case, under the independent-counsel law, replaced Fiske with Kenneth Starr, and Clinton’s true ordeal began.

Starr and his successors spent eight years, and more than seventy million dollars, on an investigation that began with the remains of the Whitewater probe and metastasized into an open-ended search-and-destroy mission into the personal and political lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Only true nineties-trivia buffs will be able to recall the full range of the accusations, which included Travelgate, Filegate, and the mystery of the missing (then found) Rose Law Firm billing records. The Clintons were pursued by a prosecutorial office fired up with political rage, but the investigation, as far as she was concerned, came to naught. The lesson she took was that Republicans used criminal investigations as a political weapon against her. In what remains her most famous utterance as a public figure, she asserted, with some justification, that there was “a vast right-wing conspiracy” out to get her family.

Starr did find pay dirt, of a sort, when he learned that Bill Clinton had lied about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky, a former White House intern, in his deposition in a sexual-harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee, giving the prosecutor the ammunition to present evidence purportedly justifying impeachment to the House of Representatives. A bill of impeachment passed the House, but the Senate failed to convict the President, and the experience hardened the Clintons’ belief that ethics investigations existed primarily to achieve political, not legal, ends.

It was against this backdrop that the story of Secretary Clinton’s private e-mail server came to light. That Clinton would even install such a rattletrap system suggests the influence of the Starr legacy. Clinton wanted a way to shield her personal business (which was her right) while also conducting State Department business on the same e-mail account. As a Washington veteran, she should have known that such a system was fraught with peril. Most government officials avoid the problem by keeping a separate account, like one on Gmail, for private e-mail. Clinton could have done that and avoided the problems, but instead she jerry-rigged a system that supposedly could handle both personal and professional work. It was a terrible idea.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Jeffrey Toobin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and the senior legal analyst for CNN since 2002. Previously, he worked for ABC News, and, in 2000, received an Emmy Award for his coverage of the Elián González case. For the magazine, he has written profiles of the Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Chief Justice John G. Roberts, as well as articles on nearly every major legal controversy and trial of the past two decades. He was the first to interview Martha Stewart about her investigation for insider trading, and the first to disclose the plans of O. J. Simpson’s defense team to accuse Mark Fuhrman of planting evidence and to play “the race card.” Before joining the magazine, he served as an Assistant United States Attorney in Brooklyn and an associate counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel Lawrence E. Walsh. His books include Opening Arguments, The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election, A Vast Conspiracy: The Real Story of the Sex Scandal That Nearly Brought Down a President, and, most recently, The Oath: The Obama White House and the Supreme Court.