This has not been a good week for Hillary Clinton. She prevailed over Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Iowa Democratic presidential caucuses by less than four-tenths of one percent of all votes cast, after having led him in polls in Iowa at one time by 40 percentage points. In her statement to supporters, standing in front of her gaunt and listless looking husband, she was not able to mouth the word "victory" or any of its standard variants. She could barely hide her contempt for the Iowa Democrats who disserted her.

Sanders isn't even a Democrat. According to official Senate records, he is an "Independent Socialist" who votes to organize the Senate with the Democrats, and sits on the Senate floor with them. Clinton, of course, is the heiress to the mightiest Democratic political apparatus in the land. Hence the question: What do the Iowa Democrats know that caused thousands of them to flee from her?

They know she is a crook.

On the Friday before Monday's caucuses, the State Department, which Clinton headed in President Obama's first term, revealed that it discovered 22 top-secret emails on the private computer server to which Clinton diverted all her governmental email traffic. This acknowledgment marks a radical departure from previous State Department pronouncements and is a direct repudiation of Clinton's repeated assertions.

She has repeatedly asserted that she neither sent nor received anything "marked classified" using her private email server. The State Department, until last Friday, has backed that up by claiming that while the substance of at least 1,300 of her emails was confidential, secret or top secret, they were not "marked" as such when she dealt with them.

These are word games. First, under the law, nothing is "marked classified." The markings are "confidential" or "secret" or "top secret," and Clinton knows this. Second, under the law, it is not the markings on the email headers that make the contents state secrets; it is the vulnerability of the contents of the emails to impair the government's national security mission that rationally characterizes them as secrets.

Clinton knows this because she signed an oath on Jan. 22, 2009 recognizing that state secrets retain their secrecy status whether "marked or unmarked" by any of the secrecy designations. She knows as well that, under the law, the secretary of state is charged with knowing state secrets when she comes upon them.

Yet, in order to further Clinton's deceptive narrative, the State Department has consistently claimed that it retroactively marked at least 1,300 emails as state secrets. It did this until last Friday.

Last Friday, the State Department revealed that 22 emails it found on Clinton's private server were in fact top secret, and were in fact marked top secret, and were in fact sent to or received from President Obama. This is a revelation that substantially undermines Clinton's political arguments and is catastrophic to her legal position.

Politically, Clinton has lost the final argument in her public arsenal — that she did not recognize top-secret data unless it was marked as top secret. She has also lost the ability to claim, as she has repeatedly, that she neither sent nor received anything marked classified, as meaningless as that phrase is.

Legally, the ground under Clinton continues to crumble. The more she denies, the more she admits. How can that be? That is so because her denials are essentially an admission of ignorance, forgetfulness or negligence, and, under the law, these are not defenses to the failure to safeguard state secrets entrusted to the secretary of state. They are, instead, recognition of that failure.