The article should probably be titled “The Crimes of Hillary Clinton.” What she has so far admitted doing would have garnered a criminal prosecution for anyone else. From Andrew P. Napolitano, at antiwar.org:
While the scandal surrounding the emails sent and received by Hillary Clinton during her time as U.S. secretary of state continues to grow, Clinton has resorted to laughing it off. This past weekend she told an audience of Iowa Democrats that she loves her Snapchat account because the messages automatically disappear. No one in the audience laughed.
Clinton admits deleting 30,000 government emails from her time in office. She claims they were personal, and that because they were also on a personal server, she was free to destroy them. Yet, federal law defines emails used during the course of one’s work for the federal government as the property of the federal government.
She could have designated which of the government’s emails were personal and then asked the government to send them to her and delete them from government servers. Instead she did the reverse. She decided which of her emails were governmental and sent them on to the State Department. Under federal law, that is not a determination she may lawfully make.
Yet, the 55,000 emails she sent to the feds were printed emails. By doing so, she stole from the government the metadata it owns, which accompanies all digital emails but is missing on the paper copies, and she denied the government the opportunity to trace those emails.
When asked why she chose to divert government emails through her own server, Clinton stated she believed it would enable her to carry just one mobile device for both personal and governmental emails. She later admitted she carried four such devices.
Then the scandal got more serious, as Clinton’s lawyers revealed that after she deleted the 30,000 emails, and printed the 55,000 she surrendered to the feds, she had the server that carried and stored them professionally wiped clean.
She had already denied routing classified materials through her server: “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. … (I) did not send classified material.”
Then, the inspector general of the State Department and the inspector general of the intelligence community, each independent of the other, found four classified emails from among a random sample of 40.
Then the State Department inspector general concluded that one of the four was in fact top secret. Since it discussed satellite imagery of a foreign country and since it revealed intercepts of communications among foreign agents, it received additional legal protections that were intended to assure that it was only discussed in a secure location and never shared with a foreign government, not even an ally.
When Clinton was confronted with these facts, she changed her explanation from “I did not send classified material” to “I never sent or never received any email marked classified.” Not only is she continually changing her story, but she is being deceptive again. Emails are not “marked classified.” They are marked “top secret” or “secret” or “confidential.” Her explanations remind one of her husband’s word-splitting playbook.
Last weekend the State Department located 305 of her undeleted emails that likely are in the top secret or secret or classified categories.
What should be the consequence of her behavior with the nation’s most sensitive secrets?
To continue reading: The Deceptions of Hillary Clinton
