The early furor over Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail server and the deletion of 30,000 e-mails created while she was Secretary of State no longer dominates the cable news. But the issue isn’t going away.

For one, her critics and Republican opponents will keep the issue alive, arguing it’s another example of her compulsion for secrecy and ignoring rules that apply to other people.

Several congressional committees headed by Republicans have been demanding a fuller accounting of her e-mail activity. Those committees say they’ve been stonewalled by Clinton and the State Department.

To Clinton’s supporters and even those who are neutral about the former First Lady, these GOP efforts can be dismissed as partisan politics. More troubling for Clinton, though, is a lawsuit filed by the Associated Press against the State Department to force the release of documents and e-mails handled by Clinton during her time as Secretary of State.

Nobody would say the Associated Press is part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Clinton once famously said fueled all efforts to discredit her husband’s presidential legacy.

The AP’s legal action has been a long time coming. For several years, the AP has requested access to more documentation of Clinton’s time as head of the State Deparment. Since 2010, the AP has filed six Freedom of Information requests. The international news organization wants to look at Clinton’s calendar and meetings. It also wants to examine records related to Clinton’s granting Special Government Employee status to her former top aide, Huma Abedin.

The AP’s lawsuit claims that the State Department failed to respond reasonably to five of the FOI requests, offering only a partial response to one FOI request.

It’s doubtful the AP will give up the fight for the e-mails and other documents, which it says are important to “inform citizens both regarding the operation of their government and regarding Secretary Clinton’s official actions as Secretary of State.”

Clinton’s comments on the issue sound dismissive. She did herself no favors by remaining silent for more than a week after the story of deleted e-mails and personal e-mail accounts made headlines. Then, she raised eyebrows by claiming the mingling of official business and personal matters in a single e-mail account was for convenience, to avoid carrying two phones. Yet it’s not uncommon to manage two separate e-mail accounts on one phone.

Revealing that she turned over 30,490 e-mails to the State Department sounded like compliance, even if late. But her statement that 31,830 e-mails were deleted because she or her staff determined they concerned personal matters, not government business, raised questions about how those decisions were made.

As several observers have suggested, Clinton’s e-mail system appeared to be less about convenience than control. Her arrangement made sure that she or her staff would decide what e-mails the public could see.

A better solution would have been to let an impartial third party examine all her e-mails while at the State Department. But Clinton has flatly rejected that option.

The best option now would be to turn over her personal server, a computer that sat in her home rather than the State Department, and let computer experts recover the deleted e-mails, which could then be examined by a third party. If the deleted e-mails are unrecoverable, it would be a red flag, suggesting extraordinary efforts were taken to remove the e-mails because deletion by an average computer user does not really wipe the information off the computer.

The deleted e-mail story is no longer making headlines, but the issue will return sooner or later.