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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 Tuesday March 31 2015, @06:20AM
Kudos for linking to the Congressional Research Service. That's an interesting statute, although I think it's probably not applicable: changing your phrasing one place and not another is indicative of Congressional intent. But even if the statute is applicable, she can say she only deleted personal emails and therefore had no intent to impede an investigation. It's just impossible to tell whether she's telling the truth, and the burden of proof is on the state.
I think where you're going wrong fundamentally is this isn't a litigatory context. Also, by the way, the interpretation of "tangible item" in the CRS report you linked is out-of-date. That interpretation was overturned on appeal in the Supreme Court case Yates v. United States, a case moderately famous for Kagan's dissent citation of Dr. Seuss.