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posted by martyb on Monday March 30 2015, @09:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the of-course-there-are-no-backups dept.

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?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @02:49PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday March 31 2015, @02:49PM (#164819) Journal

    CHRIST.

    She does not get to make the selection on her own.

    Do you not comprehend Fox guarding the chicken house?

    Imagine Debian.org sued MS for copyright infringement, demands source of a certain library. MS says "we looked -- there's no infringing code, we're not handing anything over." You'd be totally satisfied with that answer because MS would never lie. Right? You'd be 100% OK with that. That's the position you are taking and exists in no other litigatory or investagatory context. Applying your method to HRC is pure unadulterated favoritism and power fetishism.

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  • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday March 31 2015, @03:07PM

    by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Tuesday March 31 2015, @03:07PM (#164832) Journal

    Discovery in a lawsuit is a completely different situation, and there are very complex rules related to it. By the way, most companies with, "you must delete all your emails older than X weeks" policies typically have those policies because they want to have nothing responsive in discovery when they're sued for anything.

    "Fox guarding the chicken house" is a not a law. It's pounding on the facts, and the table, rather than the law. You're grasping for anything you can hold onto to try to impose a duty to preserve all her emails on her. You think what she did SHOULD have been illegal. I would, perhaps, agree with that.

    But it wasn't illegal. Accept that, and move on.

    • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @04:59PM

      by hemocyanin (186) on Tuesday March 31 2015, @04:59PM (#164888) Journal

      You keep pretending that a subpoena means nothing. In the context of a congressional investigation, FRCP 34 applies to the subpoena (via 2 USC 190m) and under that rule, it is a Judge, not the party, who gets to decide if something is discoverable.

      https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/190m [cornell.edu]
      https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_34 [cornell.edu]

      Plus there is a law over 100 years old, the same one that got Oliver North prison time, that is a direct bar against what she did:

      https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071 [cornell.edu]

      There is also an argument that 18 USC 1519 applies to this situation as I pointed out in this post: http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=6773&cid=164629 [soylentnews.org]

      You need to accept the fact that "she did nothing illegal" is far from a settled matter and not something you can just propose as fact.

      • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday March 31 2015, @11:44PM

        by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Tuesday March 31 2015, @11:44PM (#165135) Journal

        Okay, you're just outright making shit up now. 2 USC 190m doesn't say anything like that. Once again, there's no discovery when there's no lawsuit. This isn't worth my time anymore.

        • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Tuesday March 31 2015, @11:46PM

          by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Tuesday March 31 2015, @11:46PM (#165136) Journal

          Sorry, that was a little harsher than I intended. Looking back, I've been kind of rude to you in this thread. I didn't intend to be, I've just been really busy. Let's just agree to disagree.