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Anyone who follows American politics will have heard of Hillary Clinton's email server. Rather than using an official State Department address, she chose to use a private server for her official email. Federal law requires all official email to be archived on government servers. Armchair lawyers have pointed out that it doesn't require the use of government servers to send and receive the email, but the archival requirement is clear. This requirement was clearly violated in this case: in response to a subpoena, Hillary Clinton's private staff extracted emails from her private server and turned them over to the government. The contents of the server itself were never made available to the government, and now she has had the server erased:
Hillary Clinton wiped “clean” the private server housing emails from her tenure as secretary of state, the chairman of the House committee investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks in Benghazi said Friday.
“While it is not clear precisely when Secretary Clinton decided to permanently delete all emails from her server, it appears she made the decision after October 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked the Secretary to return her public record to the Department,” Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), chairman of the Select Committee on Benghazi, said in a statement.
As Popehat tweeted:
@Popehat
I ask you, who among us hasn't wiped a server clean after its contents were requested by subpoena?
I naively wonder why she isn't in jail, but that's just me. Comments and views from those interested in American politics?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TLA on Monday March 30 2015, @10:05AM
Why isn't she in jail? Politics.
To some, this might be seen as an opponent's attempt to discredit her before she even gets out of the Presidential Sweepstakes race gate. Maybe she should answer for this potentially relatively minor misdemeanour before she actually assumes office and blows the shit out of some wedding party.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday March 30 2015, @02:18PM
Of course, would-be presidents Cruz and Jeb Bush have both promised to turn Iran into a parking lot if elected. If they carry out their plans, that will making blowing up a wedding party seem like peanuts. A lot of people support this viewpoint, in what appears to be an effort to appear manly (I generally agree with George Carlin's view on why war happens: "They have bigger dicks? Bomb them!").
Over the last couple of decades, we've established a precedent that holders of high office in the US can commit war crimes and not be punished for it, despite treaty obligations that demand that we arrest them and try them for their crimes. That's also why both major political parties are adamantly opposed to the International Criminal Court: Both top Republicans and top Democrats would be in the dock the moment they set foot in any country that's a signatory. And indeed, there are some people trying to get Dick Cheney arrested if he travels to European nations that have signed on.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by TLA on Monday March 30 2015, @02:46PM
There is a document at the ICC that runs to ten and a half thousand pages (I know, I wrote the first 68 pages and then I counted them all through as I faxed them in July 2010) that would, if acted upon, see every serving and surviving previous member of UK Parliament since 1945 and every serving and surviving previous public servant in the same time period, in the dock at the ICC to answer for Crimes Against Humanity.
They won't act on it because it would tie the ICC up for the forseeable future. If it ever became public (the entire document, not just the 68-page primer and the subsequently published November 2013 556-page report on State-sanctioned abduction of children of visiting foreign nationals*, also written by me and others), then every other country on the planet would eschew Governmental mandate and International Law and just glass this island.
*Needs updating as several things have happened in the interim, including the forced cutting out of an unborn baby from a woman it was decided had suddenly developed unspecified mental illness that meant she was vacuously a "risk" of emotional harm to her child (Pacchieri case)!
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 1) by zugedneb on Tuesday March 31 2015, @07:52PM
just read about the case...
holy shit...
old saying: "a troll is a window into the soul of humanity" + also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ajax
(Score: 2) by TLA on Wednesday April 01 2015, @01:42AM
That's not the worst of them. Just one of the more recent.
Excuse me, I think I need to reboot my horse. - NCommander
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @02:35PM
If she went to jail, then the story would end and the Republicans would hate that. We need hearings! Lots of hearings! Just wait if/when she officially throws her hat in the presidential campaign circus how important Benghazi will be again. We need more Benghazi hearings!!! There is still much to uncover that the previous 300 hearings didn't cover.
Your comment is spot-on, however. Bill Clinton brought in David Gergen (a well-respected conservative adviser) as a political adviser back in the day. His advice was to dump all the Whitewater stuff out in the open, take the short-term hit, and just put the issue to rest. Unfortunately for Clinton (and the rest of us), he didn't and we had years of investigations and hearings. Republicans LOVE hearings (can you imagine if it was a Democrat president that pushed the weapons of mass destruction and war on Iraq, how many hearings and investigations we would have had on that?). They haven't figured out, or they don't care, that there is a diminishing returns point where the public turns on them because it is obvious it is just political piling on. We'll probably see that with Clinton, that she may end up as the sympathetic victim of Boehner and company. It can be a fine line that Boehner has to walk, but there are too many that rabidly foam at the mouth for this kind of shit, like Mr. Runaway above, particularly if it involves a Clinton, that they can't keep themselves constrained.