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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: 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.