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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: 2) by bradley13 on Monday March 30 2015, @05:37PM
Armchair lawyers can argue it all day, however, if we actually look at the relevant laws and regulations [nationalreview.com], we find:
- The Federal Records Act requires all federal departments to retain and preserve all records and essential transactions... This dates from 1950.
- Email messages are considered Federal records under the law - this is a statement from a State Department regulation, dating from 1995
Really, there is no doubt whatsoever that Ms. Clinton's private email server did not satisfy the Federal Records Act. She could have brought it into compliance by backing it up to a federal server, but she did not do so.
Moreover, as others have pointed out, she was under subpoena to turn over her email. It doesn't matter if she actually turned over all relevant documents - who knows, maybe she did. She has destroyed the originals, so that there is no way to know. If you or I or any other normal person responded to a subpoena by destroying the original evidence requested, we would be in for some serious trouble.
As a last note, I am profoundly irritated by the numerous comments "Oh, XXX also did that and got away with it". The fact that some other wrong escaped punishment is no excuse - with that logic, you can justify anything. Yes, Bush and Cheney should have been prosecuted for their numerous violations of domestic and international law. However, the fact that they were not, should not give the Obama administration (of which Ms. Clinton was a part) a free pass to get away with their own crimes.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 30 2015, @06:39PM
"The Federal Records Act requires all federal departments to retain and preserve all records and essential transactions... This dates from 1950."
That is not what the Act says. You are not required to retain all records only essential ones.