from The Wall Street Journal.....
the author is Michael Mukasey; 'Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York (1988-2006).'
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-defies-the-law-and-common-sense-1439592595
Clinton Defies the Law and Common Sense
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct public business while serving as secretary of state, followed by the deletion of information on that server and the transfer to her lawyer of a thumb drive containing heretofore unexplored data, engages several issues of criminal law—but the overriding issue is one of plain common sense.
Let’s consider the potentially applicable criminal laws in order of severity.
It is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than a year to keep “documents or materials containing classified information . . . at an unauthorized location.” Note that it is the information that is protected; the issue doesn’t turn on whether the document or materials bear a classified marking. This is the statute under which David Petraeus—former Army general and Central Intelligence Agency director—was prosecuted for keeping classified information at home. Mrs. Clinton’s holding of classified information on a personal server was a violation of that law. So is transferring that information on a thumb drive to David Kendall, her lawyer.
Moving up the scale, the law relating to public records generally makes it a felony for anyone having custody of a “record or other thing” that is “deposited with . . . a public officer” to “remove” or “destroy” it, with a maximum penalty of three years. Emails are records, and the secretary of state is a public officer and by statute their custodian.
The Espionage Act defines as a felony, punishable by up to 10 years, the grossly negligent loss or destruction of “information relating to the national defense.” Note that at least one of the emails from the small random sample taken by the inspector general for the intelligence community contained signals intelligence and was classified top secret.
The highest step in this ascending scale of criminal penalties—20 years maximum—is reached by anyone who destroys “any record, document or tangible object with intent to impede, obstruct or influence the proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States . . . or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter.”
So, for example, if Mrs. Clinton caused to be wiped out emails that might have been anticipated to be of interest to a congressional committee, such conduct would come within the sweep of the statute. That, by the way, is the obstruction-of-justice statute, as revised by the Sarbanes-Oxley law, passed by Congress in 2002 while Mrs. Clinton served as a senator, and for which she voted.
All of this is not to suggest that Mrs. Clinton is in real danger of going to jail any time soon. All of these laws require at least knowing conduct, and the obstruction statute requires specific intent to impede at least a contemplated proceeding. It is not helpful to Mrs. Clinton’s cause that the emails finally turned over to the State Department were in paper rather than electronic form, which makes it impossible to search them—and easier to alter them—and would thus tend to impede rather than advance a congressional investigation.
To be sure, this particular email was turned over, but on paper rather than in its original electronic form, without the metadata that went with it. If other emails of like sensitivity are among the 30,000 Mrs. Clinton erased, that is yet more problematic. The server is now in the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose forensic skills in recovering data in situations like this are unexcelled.
Further, we won’t know whether permanent damage was done by the email erasure unless someone manages to examine the thumb drive in the possession of Mr. Kendall. The actual erasure of material appears to have been done by one or more of Mrs. Clinton’s aides, and we can certainly expect some or all of them to dive, if not be thrown, under the bus. Nonetheless, these statutes serve at least to measure the severity with which the law views the conduct here.
The common-sense issues in this matter are more problematic than the criminal ones. Anyone who enters the Situation Room at the White House, where Mrs. Clinton was photographed during the Osama bin Laden raid, is required to place any personal electronic device in a receptacle outside the room, lest it be activated involuntarily and confidential communications disclosed.
Mrs. Clinton herself, in a now famous email, cautioned State Department employees not to conduct official business on personal email accounts. The current secretary of state,John Kerry, testified that he assumes that his emails have been the object of surveillance by hostile foreign powers. It is inconceivable that the nation’s senior foreign-relations official was unaware of the risk that communications about this country’s relationships with foreign governments would be of particular interest to those governments, and to others.
It is no answer to say, as Mrs. Clinton did at one time, that emails were not marked classified when sent or received. Of course they were not; there is no little creature sitting on the shoulders of public officials classifying words as they are uttered and sent. But the laws are concerned with the sensitivity of information, not the sensitivity of the markings on whatever may contain the information.
The culture in Washington, particularly among senior-executive officials, is pervasively risk-averse, and has been for some time. When I took office as U.S. attorney general in 2007, members of my staff saw to it that I stopped carrying a BlackBerry, lest I inadvertently send confidential information over an insecure network or lest it be activated, without my knowledge, and my communications monitored.
When I attended my first briefing in a secure facility, and brought a pad to take notes, my chief of staff leaned over and wrote in bold capital letters at the top of the first page, “TS/SCI,” meaning Top Secret, Secure Compartmentalized Information—which is to say, information that may be looked at only in what is known as a SCIF, a Secure, Compartmentalized Information Facility. My office was considered a SCIF; my apartment was not.
The point he was making by doing that—and this is just the point that seems to have eluded the former secretary of state—is one of common sense: Once you assume a public office, your communications about anything having to do with your job are not your personal business or property. They are the public’s business and the public’s property, and are to be treated as no different from communications of like sensitivity.
That something so obvious could have eluded Mrs. Clinton raises questions about her suitability both for the office she held and for the office she seeks.
It never dawned on her? Seriously?........are Americans okay to turn a blind eye? she made a mistake? she's above the law?
the author is Michael Mukasey; 'Mr. Mukasey served as U.S. attorney general (2007-09) and as a U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York (1988-2006).'
http://www.wsj.com/articles/clinton-defies-the-law-and-common-sense-1439592595
Clinton Defies the Law and Common Sense
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to conduct public business while serving as secretary of state, followed by the deletion of information on that server and the transfer to her lawyer of a thumb drive containing heretofore unexplored data, engages several issues of criminal law—but the overriding issue is one of plain common sense.
Let’s consider the potentially applicable criminal laws in order of severity.
It is a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not more than a year to keep “documents or materials containing classified information . . . at an unauthorized location.” Note that it is the information that is protected; the issue doesn’t turn on whether the document or materials bear a classified marking. This is the statute under which David Petraeus—former Army general and Central Intelligence Agency director—was prosecuted for keeping classified information at home. Mrs. Clinton’s holding of classified information on a personal server was a violation of that law. So is transferring that information on a thumb drive to David Kendall, her lawyer.
Moving up the scale, the law relating to public records generally makes it a felony for anyone having custody of a “record or other thing” that is “deposited with . . . a public officer” to “remove” or “destroy” it, with a maximum penalty of three years. Emails are records, and the secretary of state is a public officer and by statute their custodian.
The Espionage Act defines as a felony, punishable by up to 10 years, the grossly negligent loss or destruction of “information relating to the national defense.” Note that at least one of the emails from the small random sample taken by the inspector general for the intelligence community contained signals intelligence and was classified top secret.
The highest step in this ascending scale of criminal penalties—20 years maximum—is reached by anyone who destroys “any record, document or tangible object with intent to impede, obstruct or influence the proper administration of any matter within the jurisdiction of any department or agency of the United States . . . or in relation to or contemplation of any such matter.”
So, for example, if Mrs. Clinton caused to be wiped out emails that might have been anticipated to be of interest to a congressional committee, such conduct would come within the sweep of the statute. That, by the way, is the obstruction-of-justice statute, as revised by the Sarbanes-Oxley law, passed by Congress in 2002 while Mrs. Clinton served as a senator, and for which she voted.
All of this is not to suggest that Mrs. Clinton is in real danger of going to jail any time soon. All of these laws require at least knowing conduct, and the obstruction statute requires specific intent to impede at least a contemplated proceeding. It is not helpful to Mrs. Clinton’s cause that the emails finally turned over to the State Department were in paper rather than electronic form, which makes it impossible to search them—and easier to alter them—and would thus tend to impede rather than advance a congressional investigation.
To be sure, this particular email was turned over, but on paper rather than in its original electronic form, without the metadata that went with it. If other emails of like sensitivity are among the 30,000 Mrs. Clinton erased, that is yet more problematic. The server is now in the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose forensic skills in recovering data in situations like this are unexcelled.
Further, we won’t know whether permanent damage was done by the email erasure unless someone manages to examine the thumb drive in the possession of Mr. Kendall. The actual erasure of material appears to have been done by one or more of Mrs. Clinton’s aides, and we can certainly expect some or all of them to dive, if not be thrown, under the bus. Nonetheless, these statutes serve at least to measure the severity with which the law views the conduct here.
The common-sense issues in this matter are more problematic than the criminal ones. Anyone who enters the Situation Room at the White House, where Mrs. Clinton was photographed during the Osama bin Laden raid, is required to place any personal electronic device in a receptacle outside the room, lest it be activated involuntarily and confidential communications disclosed.
Mrs. Clinton herself, in a now famous email, cautioned State Department employees not to conduct official business on personal email accounts. The current secretary of state,John Kerry, testified that he assumes that his emails have been the object of surveillance by hostile foreign powers. It is inconceivable that the nation’s senior foreign-relations official was unaware of the risk that communications about this country’s relationships with foreign governments would be of particular interest to those governments, and to others.
It is no answer to say, as Mrs. Clinton did at one time, that emails were not marked classified when sent or received. Of course they were not; there is no little creature sitting on the shoulders of public officials classifying words as they are uttered and sent. But the laws are concerned with the sensitivity of information, not the sensitivity of the markings on whatever may contain the information.
The culture in Washington, particularly among senior-executive officials, is pervasively risk-averse, and has been for some time. When I took office as U.S. attorney general in 2007, members of my staff saw to it that I stopped carrying a BlackBerry, lest I inadvertently send confidential information over an insecure network or lest it be activated, without my knowledge, and my communications monitored.
When I attended my first briefing in a secure facility, and brought a pad to take notes, my chief of staff leaned over and wrote in bold capital letters at the top of the first page, “TS/SCI,” meaning Top Secret, Secure Compartmentalized Information—which is to say, information that may be looked at only in what is known as a SCIF, a Secure, Compartmentalized Information Facility. My office was considered a SCIF; my apartment was not.
The point he was making by doing that—and this is just the point that seems to have eluded the former secretary of state—is one of common sense: Once you assume a public office, your communications about anything having to do with your job are not your personal business or property. They are the public’s business and the public’s property, and are to be treated as no different from communications of like sensitivity.
That something so obvious could have eluded Mrs. Clinton raises questions about her suitability both for the office she held and for the office she seeks.
It never dawned on her? Seriously?........are Americans okay to turn a blind eye? she made a mistake? she's above the law?
[h=1]STATE DEPT. FINDS 17,855 MISSING HILLARY CLINTON ADVISER EMAILS[/h]
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
by JOHN SEXTON17 Aug 20153,965
[h=2]More than two years after the State Department claimed there were no emails responsive to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about a close Hillary Clinton adviser’s contact with the media, the Department has informed a judge it has located 17,855 emails that appear to match the criteria.[/h]The website Gawker filed a FOIA request in 2012 seeking any emails between Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines (a top Hillary Clinton adviser) and a list of 33 major media outlets. Interest in Reines’ correspondence with the media was prompted by an angry email exchange between Reines and journalist Michael Hastings. In the exchange, Reines lost his temper and told Hastings to “f-ck off.”
In July of 2013, the State Department responded to Gawker’s request with a letter which stated, “After a thorough search…no records responsive to your request were located.” Earlier this year Gawker filed a lawsuit asking a judge to force State to produce documents which were responsive to its initial FOIA request.
Finally, in a “court-ordered status report” the State Department has admitted to having located 81,159 emails belonging to Reines. Of those, State found 22 percent may be responsive to the FOIA request made back in 2012. “The Department believes that it will need to conduct a line-by-line review of an estimated 17,855 emails for applicable FOIA exemptions,” the status update reads.
The State Department now says it has so many documents that are responsive to the initial request that it will need to issue a group of them every 30 days until all 17,855 have been released. State adds that it is unable to even estimate how long the total production will take.
No explanation is offered in the status report for why the State Department initially claimed there were zero responsive records to the same request.
by JOHN SEXTON17 Aug 20153,965
[h=2]More than two years after the State Department claimed there were no emails responsive to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about a close Hillary Clinton adviser’s contact with the media, the Department has informed a judge it has located 17,855 emails that appear to match the criteria.[/h]The website Gawker filed a FOIA request in 2012 seeking any emails between Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Philippe Reines (a top Hillary Clinton adviser) and a list of 33 major media outlets. Interest in Reines’ correspondence with the media was prompted by an angry email exchange between Reines and journalist Michael Hastings. In the exchange, Reines lost his temper and told Hastings to “f-ck off.”
In July of 2013, the State Department responded to Gawker’s request with a letter which stated, “After a thorough search…no records responsive to your request were located.” Earlier this year Gawker filed a lawsuit asking a judge to force State to produce documents which were responsive to its initial FOIA request.
Finally, in a “court-ordered status report” the State Department has admitted to having located 81,159 emails belonging to Reines. Of those, State found 22 percent may be responsive to the FOIA request made back in 2012. “The Department believes that it will need to conduct a line-by-line review of an estimated 17,855 emails for applicable FOIA exemptions,” the status update reads.
The State Department now says it has so many documents that are responsive to the initial request that it will need to issue a group of them every 30 days until all 17,855 have been released. State adds that it is unable to even estimate how long the total production will take.
No explanation is offered in the status report for why the State Department initially claimed there were zero responsive records to the same request.
Maybe Hillary Clinton just isn’t a very good candidate
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...lary-clinton-just-isnt-a-very-good-candidate/
:lolBIG:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...lary-clinton-just-isnt-a-very-good-candidate/
:lolBIG:
Still on the "lie about reading it that". You really are one dumb mother fucker. I didn't read the latest issue of Sports Illustrated right away......then I read it.
The fact that you can't grasp that concept.....shows how fucking retarded you are.
You and Russ have the biggest spam/ troll threads here. Whether it's connecting dots, hypocrisy or some hate filled Muslim or gay thread.
spam
spam/
noun
spam/
noun
- 1.
irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of recipients.
Nothing in this thread is irrelevant or inappropriate yet our troll continues to Alinskyize. A troll simply cannot stand to have things posted that are relevant and approopriate when they are directed at one of his fellow liberals. He has failed to disprove anything to date. He simply personalizes Alinsky style and avoids reality. If Hillary did nothing wrong why would even places like MSNBC be getting it. Spam that would be the troll doing double dribble. Trouble is the troll can dribble all day long but he can't hit a single shot. Meanwhile people are dunking all around him and his only defense is to Alinsky on. Pathetic.
Meanwhile a large number of recipients can see something for what it is but not a troll/spammer/alilnskyite. He is outnumbered because as always he is on the wrong side of the fence. Defend Hillary or STFU troll boy.
Seriously Russ......hasn't life slapped you around enough? Must I keep doing it as well?
nobody knows or cares about alinsky.....nobody follows any rules written by some dude that died decades ago. Get a fucking grip on reality.
Like Dave, you're an old dude that has been wrong about everything his entire life. These last years....don't you want people to say " that Russ finally got it right at the end". Or do you want to be the guy everyone sees as a nutbag without a clue? Now at rx poly forum...you will be viewed as someone who gets it because most down here are mentally ill....but when you step out of here.....you're the old dude that people feel sorry for.
Stop wasting time connecting imaginary dots from wacky fringe websites....just ask me what's gonna happen and I will tell you. History has proven here that I'm right about stuff and most everybody else isn't. Don't you wanna be right for once? All you gotta do is ask.
nobody knows or cares about alinsky.....nobody follows any rules written by some dude that died decades ago. Get a fucking grip on reality.
Like Dave, you're an old dude that has been wrong about everything his entire life. These last years....don't you want people to say " that Russ finally got it right at the end". Or do you want to be the guy everyone sees as a nutbag without a clue? Now at rx poly forum...you will be viewed as someone who gets it because most down here are mentally ill....but when you step out of here.....you're the old dude that people feel sorry for.
Stop wasting time connecting imaginary dots from wacky fringe websites....just ask me what's gonna happen and I will tell you. History has proven here that I'm right about stuff and most everybody else isn't. Don't you wanna be right for once? All you gotta do is ask.
