There are plenty of laws where intent matters. First degree murder is different from manslaughter.
There’s a big difference between accidentally dropping a classified document out of your briefcase and having it be picked up by an enemy agent, and intentionally handing a classified document over to an enemy agent. In the first case, the person is careless and should not be trusted with secrets. In the second case, the person is treasonous and should be in jail.
That seems to me to be a reasonable bright line - did she do any of this to intentionally thwart secrecy laws, or was she just incompetent and sloppy? Only one of those situations is criminal, but either one indicates that Hillary is at best a very flawed candidate.
Considering the incredible volume of classified material that would have gone through her office, she and her team are bound to have mishandled (meaning put in the wrong box, emailed without encryption, dropped in the wrong trash can, etc.) a handful. I’ve been working with classified docs for over a decade, and this is incredibly commonplace (which may be troubling).
What I find most troubling is her arrogance and dismissiveness towards the recommendations regarding her blackberry and email usage by the security professionals. Not disqualifying, IMO (especially with Trump in the mix), but a mark against her. But, again, top officials will usually come with top-sized egos, and top-sized egos greatly increase the chance of ignoring advice from peons, so even this kind of thing is probably very common.
One of the silver linings is that most of Hillary’s scandals simply stem from her entitlement and thinking she should be treated like a President whether she is or not. Electing her President actually solves that problem to a large extent.
Although given her obsession with secrecy(at least of her own affairs if not the nation’s), she should be wary of expanding NSA surveillance on Americans. “Our business is her business, but her business is none of our business” would not make for a very trusted Presidency.
Based on conversations I’ve had with Army CI agents, intent is a HUGE deal where material handling his concerned. Even people who willfully and deliberately hand information to foreign powers often escape with a slap on the wrist for “mishandling” classified information because it is almost impossible to prove intent.
But as for Hillary being a very flawed candidate - I agree, but the alternative is vastly, unbelievably worse in every conceivable way.
They ran private unsecured servers in their home basements and communicated with the using unsecured Blackberries after having been personally told that their security practices were likely to lead to foreign governments spying on them, acknowledged that the situation was insecure, but did nothing to resolve it?
I recall during the Bush years quite a kerfuffle over a fake turkey used for a photo op. For a few days that was a major scandal, eclipsed only by the fake brush clearing Bush was doing at his ranch.
Of course, by his second term none of that stuff mattered, since Katrina and Iraq and firing US attorneys in a non-transparent fashion destroyed the public’s trust in him. But while he was reasonably popular, the left was breathlessly latching onto any story that made him look a little bad. That’s normal behavior for partisans. The Clintons are not actually any more persecuted than anyone else except to the extent that they try to get away with more shit than anyone else.
Some commentators have pointed to section (f) -here- and have claimed intent is not necessary to violate this statute. Any comments?
“(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”
So, all the previous SOS’s doing the same thing, are also unfit? It wasn’t only Clinton doing this and it doesn’t necessarily make it nefarious in that context, unless you consider it nefarious that the Republican SOSs did this as well.
Which former Sec of States had private email servers in their basement? Which of them conducted business over their personal Blackberry/cell phone? Which specifically ignored their security experts’ advice on these isuues? I’m all ears.
Well, hey, if the conspiracies are true and Clinton could convince a Republican with his finger on the trigger to let her go and become president despite her obvious guilt, I guess she really is the best person to break Washington gridlock.
Just noticed that the FBI director was a Bush appointee and served on the Senate Whitewater Committee, so if he is rigging shit for HRC (as Trump said), then this election is over.
Sure, Comey is a Republican and Bush appointee but he’s also the guy who put Fitzgerald on the Plame case and you remember people saying what a Democratic shill Fitzgerald (also a Republican) was when he indicted Libby.
This goes deeper than we could ever imagine. You’d almost think some people are just doing their job aside from the politics of it.
Comey is one of the truly great men in Washington. Anyone who doubts that he did his job in a nonpartisan fashion doesn’t know anything about his record.
