The setting up of and maintaining a private email network as the sole means to conduct official business by email, coupled with the failure to timely return email records into government custody, amounts to actions plainly inconsistent with the federal recordkeeping laws.
Jason R. Baron
Former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration
Told to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2015
147 FBI agents are reportedly involved in the Hillary Clinton email investigation — here’s how the scandal took root
[Also, there were 22 emails which, according to Rep. Chris Stewart (R-Utah), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence,:
…are on their face sensitive and obviously classified, This information should have been maintained in the most secure, classified, top-secret servers.
As Bill Whittle said, “Here Be Dragons”:
If she is not indicted will others guilty of similar crimes get out of jail or escape prosecution due to lack of “equal protection under the law”?
If she is indicted will she drop out of the race? Can she take office if she is in prison on inauguration day? Can Hillary pardon herself?
Where is my popcorn? This is going to be, by far, the most interesting election I have ever seen.—Joe]
For another amusing scenario, suitable for the plot line for a novel: Hilary wins the general election by a small margin, indictment comes through on the next day. All of a sudden people realize that “electors” are people, not just check marks on a tally sheet. How many of Hillary’s electors will decline to vote for her when the actual election for president (that is, the day when the electors vote) is held? Who else might they vote for? Will the decision land in the House?
IIRC, most, if not all, states today have laws requiring that their electors be bound by the popular vote. They no longer have the option to vote their conscience.
Sure, but so what? It’s a bit like laws purporting to restrict what jurors can do. The Constitution does not authorize any such thing in any case, and besides, once the electors vote, those ballots go to Congress to be counted. Any attempt to punish electors for what they did is going to be quite pointless because the decision has been made.
When Harry Browne voted for the Libertarian candidate rather than for Nixon, was he punished? Or did that predate those laws?
May you live in interesting times.
Hillary get indicted, BHO then offers blanket pardons to a number of people including her. The Death Star destroys the Trump Tower and a pregnant Sarah Connor moves to Mexico.
Or maybe not.
Andrew McCarthy analyzes it quite well:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433369/hillary-clinton-e-mail-scandal-justice-department-stonewall
Any bets?
Given what the Clintons have gotten away with in the past, I don’t believe Hillary is worrying. In her worst case scenario, someone else can always take the fall for her. She’ll pretend to have tried protecting this poor unfortunate individual who made an understandable mistake, and she’ll come out the hero. Someone else will end up dead in Fort Marcy Park with multiple, self inflicted gunshot wounds to the back of the head and the media will ignore it. Others will flee the country, never to be seen or discussed, or thought of, again. Her fans will love her, and how could you dare accuse her of all those awful things, you brute.
Not with a bang but a whimper.
The Leftist adjunct army, the “Journalists” aka “the Media” are doing their level best to ignore this crime, to the point that a Leftist can say in my presence last month, in all seriousness (and ignorance) that the emails are really a minor problem for Hillary.
President Obama can and will issue pardons on his way out of office.
Pardon number one will go to Hillary Clinton.
Can she take office if she is in prison on inauguration day? Can Hillary pardon herself?
Considering that concealing or destroying any record or document that is filed with or kept by any public officer in the United States — as in, the Secretary of State’s official e-mails — is a federal crime (18 U.S.C. 2071), which carries as part of the sentence that, if convicted, such a person “shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit [her] office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States” [emphasis added], Hillary would no longer have any authority to pardon herself.
We’ve been citing laws here for years (18 USC 241 & 18 USC 242 for example) without a single case of them being enforced in a second amendment violation. To the authoritarian, laws are only for appearing to be good, and for fighting one’s political or idealogical enemies.
That, and a pardon is a pardon, and the crime is officially erased. I can hear it now;
“She did nothing wrong, She’s served her country with distinction, and so we’re going to stop this politically-motivated witch hunt against her…”
To the authoritarian, laws are only for appearing to be good, and for fighting one’s political or idealogical [sic] enemies.
True, to an authoritarian, the law is itself a weapon to be wielded against one’s enemies. And when the current law is insufficient to the task — when one’s enemies aren’t guilty enough to dispose of using legal channels — one changes the law or invents new crimes to “fix” it.
That, and a pardon is a pardon, and the crime is officially erased.
Also true, but the question was, “Can Hillary pardon herself?” If convicted of violating 18 U.S.C. 2071 (big “IF”), the answer is: No, she cannot. Someone else in the future may feel inclined to pardon her, but she will have been stripped of the authority to do it herself.
The first pol to promise, and look like he’ll follow through on, to pursue those laws against politicians, judges, LEOs, and DAs that prosecute people under illegal gun laws will get my enthusiastic donations and support.
As I’ve repeatedly told Better Half at this point (probably to her annoyance), I had access to Secret and Top Secret information in the course of my DoD and DoE jobs.
If I had done a mere fraction of what Hillary has definitively done at this point, you’d never even hear about it.
I’d be quietly disappeared to a no-name location to be dealt with, and that’d be the end of it. No headlines. No drawn-out whatever-the-hell is going on right now. Just a midnight raid, a few broken door frames, and that would be that.
Anyone ever imprisoned for publicizing or leaking sensitive information should be calling up any and every lawyer they can get a hold of.
Sure, but that just demonstrates you’re not one of “our people”. If you were, laws like those (and victim disarmament laws) don’t apply.