During a 2007 appearance at the “Take Back America” conference hosted each year by the progressive advocacy group Campaign for America’s Future, Hillary Clinton told her audience that, under President George W. Bush, the “Constitution is being shredded.” As prima facie evidence, she cited “the secret White House email accounts.”

Eight years later, the once and presumptive future Democratic presidential candidate no longer thinks it an affront to the Constitution for a public official to have a secret email account, which she had during the four years she served as Barack Obama’s secretary of state.

Mrs. Clinton managed to keep her stealth email account hush-hush until the New York Times broke the story. And after going silent, she finally responded — “I want the public to see my email,” Mrs. Clinton tweeted. “I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible.”

Well, if she is as transparent as her tweet suggested, if she really wanted the public to see her emails, she could have asked the State Department to release them when she left in 2013.

Or even last August, when the White House and State Department learned of her secret email account — after it was first uncovered by the House select committee on Benghazi.

What the public learned last week is that the White House and “State” were complicit in Mrs. Clinton’s concealment of her secret email account, which according to ABC News, was a violation of State Department rules.

Obama administration officials knew that, if revelations of the former secretary of state’s secret email account found its way into the news, a scandal almost certainly would break.

So they punted the matter to Mrs. Clinton, who decided to keep it under wraps in hope that neither the media nor the American people found out.

That’s a character defect she shares with her husband, Bill Clinton.

It is because Mrs. Clinton was so determined to avoid scrutiny of her actions during her tenure as secretary of state that she refused a State Department email account in favor of a personal email domain — Clintonmail.com — hosted by a server she owned.

“As much as I’ve been investigated,” she foreshadowed in 2000, “why would I ever want to do email. Can you imagine?”

Well, creating a secret email account certainly wasn’t the way for Mrs. Clinton to avoid scrutiny. Indeed, all she accomplished with her lack of transparency was to invite investigation.