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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 linuxrocks123 on Monday March 30 2015, @10:07PM
I said it was aggressive, but your comparison is deeply flawed.
The duty to preserve evidence requires that you should have reasonably believed a lawsuit was imminent. I don't think there was any reason for Clinton to think she was about to be sued. The subpoena was Congressional, not from a court. I don't think Congress can even enter sanctions for spoilation of evidence.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @04:22AM
Let me understand this.
1) She gets a subpoena for emails.
2) She prints off some emails in response to that subpoena.
3) She deletes all the emails.
4) After doing 1, 2, & 3, she had no idea they would want examine the mail server.
What more notice would she need? It sounds a lot more like an "oh shit, better get rid of this" than anything else.
Secondly, as I've been digging around, one of the things that Ollie North some jail time was this: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071 [cornell.edu]
Been the law for a long long time -- scrap the ex post facto BS. And the punishment is perfect: barred from holding public office (also fines and jail -- like she'd actually get jail, but the big one is bar from office which is not optional). Man, it would be so cool to see her convicted on that, she and Ollie North could drink whiskey together and bitch about things.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday March 31 2015, @06:46AM
That law doesn't seem relevant. Why would her personal emails fall under things "filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States". Not applicable.
Man, it would be so cool to see her convicted on that, she and Ollie North could drink whiskey together and bitch about things.
Fantasizing is healthy as long as you don't let it interfere with your perception of reality. Go to sleep, that's the only way you'll see her convicted on anything related to this.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @07:55AM
How do we know if they were personal emails? The person under investigation doesn't get to make that determination. THAT is the issue. If they were personal, they don't come in. Now we will never know if they were personal because she broke a law that was 100 years old back in the 80s when Ollie North went down for doing the same shit.
(Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday March 31 2015, @02:57PM
In the absence of a judicial order stating otherwise, yes, that person does get to make that determination. A phone company doesn't have to hand over all phone records when it's subpoenaed for some subset of those, and it doesn't have to hold non-responsive phone records in case they're desired later. Hillary Clinton was under no obligation to preserve all her emails, just her job-related ones, and, as far as anyone will ever know, she turned all of those over.