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 Tuesday March 31 2015, @07:59PM
Yes, everyone who disagrees with you is a die hard HRC supporter. Its not that they're concerned with upholding the law and the constitution or anything, their sole opposition to you is purely that they worship HRC.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Tuesday March 31 2015, @09:35PM
I'm a hardcore bill of rights person. There is nothing in the bill of rights that even hints that destroying evidence sought in a subpoena is a protected action. The subpoena process and the associated court rules are due process, and those rules were broken by HRC.
Am I gleeful that she broke the law because I would wish that we could have a NOT-neocon-warmonger running in at least one side of the DNCGOP monoparty -- fucking yes I am. I would be gleeful over anything that might keep that warmonging HRC from polluting the next election. I certainly wouldn't advocate breaking the Bill of Rights, but that isn't an issue here at all and this could have been completely resolved if for example, a Judge was allowed to do an in camera review of the server and then say, these emails are in, and these are out.
Remember -- it was HRC's choice to commingle the data. She didn't have to make that choice, but having made it, she must suffer the consequences which are that she is not the final arbiter of whether things are discoverable. Not under the Constitution, the USC, or the FRCP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 01 2015, @12:06AM
The judge and court disagrees with you. But they're just a bunch of morons anyway, you know the law and can do their jobs far better than them.