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So what? That might sound flippant but it's truly not. What is the implication or application to politics here? What are we supposed to do with this information/what is the logical call to action? I think that's almost as important as discussing the actual contents.
Example. A lot might read your post and linked article, and let's say for the sake of argument it's all true. Some might say, "well this means Trump shouldn't be charged for the crimes he's currently accused of." Nothing could be farther from the truth.
Because at the end of the day, intent does matter. While Hillary is certainly guilty of thinking she's above the law, used to be coddled by the media, and having her wishes fulfilled by government bureaucrats, and being dishonest on top, she didn't intend to expose confidential or classified information and most of the email saga came down to a mixture of negligence and pride. Contrast Trump in the most recent classified docs saga. It's NOT an issue of over-classification (though it does exist). It's NOT a case of negligence, as he was given a number of chances to cooperate. It was WILLFUL retention of government secrets. It's not like he couldn't access these secrets -- I'm almost certain former presidents are given access to these materials if they are writing their memoirs, for example. It was the pride of "owning" them, though they manifestly weren't his. It doesn't matter how the investigation started, only how it ends.
Vague gestures at other would-be conspiracies sound much like the Steele Dossier inspired ones. Hunter Biden has gone through at least one GOP led congressional investigation. So far, not a whole lot to show.
The President is the Constitutional, ultimate classifying authority. If Trump wanted to maintain those documents, as president, that suffices.
Anyways your post just reads like an elaborate rationalization. Hillary's crimes aren't so bad because reason-reason-reason, Hunter Biden's crimes aren't so bad because reason-reason-reason, but Trump's crimes are bad because... How do you know that Hillary Clinton didn't "intend" to expose materials? How do you know that the documents manifestly aren't Trump's, when we don't know what the documents even are? You can fill in the blanks however you want, I guess, but it won't make a very rigorous argument.
Investigate Trump over Russia, investigate Trump's business records, investigate Trump's campaign, investigate Trump's sexual relations, investigate Trump's administration... wow, after eight years of manufacturing pretexts to spy on him, he finally committed a crime after we picked a fight. He waved classified documents in front of a reporter's face and everything. Guess we have to charge him now, everyone is equal before the law, justice and democracy and liberty and freedom prevail. What, charge other politicians? Hahahaha
Well the Clintons had undergone multiple decades of scrutiny before the election so it makes sense there's only so much "new" stuff. Whitewater, for example. If she had been new to politics like Trump, you'd see a similar level of scrutiny. And in fact if you sum up all the investigations on the Clintons over the years you probably get a similar scope. Trump has so many investigations because he was a businessman in a famously shady business (real estate and show business both tend to be full of obfuscation and do often hide real crime), not because of being a "threat" to the "establishment". And note that Justice was indeed served at the end of the day, most of the investigations didn't turn up too much and the one that did (impeachment) went through the normal process and he was found not guilty. End of story. I know people were bitter about investigations starting but in the end he wasn't actually harmed all that much?
It also makes zero sense that Hillary would deliberately allow her personal email to be hacked. That's an insane suggestion and you should feel bad for making it. Note that I never accused Trump of actually cooperating with a foreign power or anything. Just like in Hillary's case, it's a pride thing, but manifested a different way. When you're no longer the President, you are no longer the President! You can't just make your own rules, much less retroactively, you have to "declare" them and then follow them. That's what the whole presidential order system is for. Trump even himself admitted that he could have but did NOT declassify these things in order to keep them. And either you're being disingenuous or are misinformed when you say we don't know what's in the documents. We have a decent idea of at least a few articles, and they are most definitely classified. And remember, the classification system exists to protect harmful secrets from becoming public. It defeats the whole purpose if you arbitrarily declare manifestly harmful secrets to be declassified (read: non-harmful) when they clearly still have the same potential for harm.
Don't get me wrong, I DO think Hillary should have been charged with a lesser crime of negligence and maybe obstruction, but in terms of setting a precedent it's more important to convey to future leaders Cabinet level and up that negligence is bad and will hurt you politically but willful disobedience will result in criminal charges. That's a reasonable precedent in my opinion. After all we don't want to make a habit of charging former officials left and right, it leads to a cycle of retribution. You might ask, well won't this Trump thing lead to it? It wouldn't have if there wasn't WILLFUL lawbreaking involved.
This is not what I said or what I implied. It sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.
Hillary didn't put classified documents on a private email; she put them on a private email server. This is a big difference. This is the difference between opening a private bank account at Fort Knox, and opening your own Fort Knox. The US government maintains a vast infrastructure of classified networks. Thousands of technicians work to keep those networks safe and secure. There is a classified email network, that runs on its own servers, that runs on its own devices, totally in parallel to the regular internet. Some of the best security in the world is applied to it. China can't hack into it, Russia can't hack into it. It would be a big deal if they could. Breaking into the US's encrypted networks would be like cracking the Enigma Cipher.
When you work on a classified system, there is literally, on every monitor, a big bar running across the top that says something like:
<<[[THIS IS A CLASSIFIED SYSTEM. CONTROL OF THIS MATERIAL IS AUTHORIZED BY THE US GOVERNMENT]]>>
It's not embedded in the web page of your browser. It's part of the screen. Every single device has a label saying that it is a machine designed for the classified network. This is before documents are even marked with classification markings.
Hillary didn't take some emails from one bucket and move them to another. Politicians maintain private email accounts all the time, and naturally sometimes conduct official business on personal time. That's normal. That's not what Hillary did. It would be meaningless if she had.
Hillary made her own private email server. She replaced the thousands of technical workers, the parallel infrastructure, the monitor warnings, everything. Her server, as I understand it, was basically maintained by one guy. Imagine if I tried spinning up a competitor to gmail, and I ran it out of my basement. It's a small operation, so it's just me maintaining everything. I've borrowed whatever code and servers I need to make it work. That's how secure her server was.
This is so monumentally stupid, and illegal, that either Hillary knew exactly what she was doing, or someone would have told her that what she was doing is wrong. There are no accidents about this. There is no legitimate reason for her to have made a private email server. Perhaps it's not so nefarious, and she wasn't trying to sell state secrets but was, say, annoyed by some technical restrictions and wanted to get around them. She wanted to run it off her Blackberry, whatever. In any event, it's stupid. She made a very stupid decision. It's a stupid decision because there is no possible way she can guarantee the technical safety of those documents running on that server. It's eminently possible that Russia, or China, or, for that matter, some scriptkiddie could have hacked her server. A private server has exactly as much protection as you put on it. She put one or a few guys on it. That's it.
I spun up a private server for testing one time and within 24 hours some hacker in Russia sent me an email saying that he'd found an open port on my server. I turned the server off, and within 5 minutes I had a reply from him saying he'd noticed I'd turned the server off and would I please send him some money since he "warned" me of my mistake. There are guys and groups like that, they go around sniffing every device on the internet to see if it's something they could exploit. National governments have guys like that too.
So:
Hillary didn't deliberately allow her personal emails to be hacked. She just created the exact conditions in which, if it's not inevitable, it was extremely likely. She had no legitimate reason to do this. She would have had no permission to do this. She had no Constitutional authority to do this. Her best excuse is that she was inconvenienced by the rules. Other excuses could be worse. I wouldn't know what her excuse would be, the only answers the press ever made her give were that it was a mistake and she regretted it and let's move on.
I know you said you think she should have been charged, but I want to make it very clear what the nature of her offense did. What Trump did or is accused of doing is not in the same universe as what Hillary did. She is not going to get charged. The FBI, in fact, actively tried to cover up what she did, and gave all her subordinates immunity in exchange for "cooperating" with their investigation. Trump, meanwhile, is being charged. Because he's Trump, and they hate him. You can argue that they should charge Trump and Hillary too. But that's not how this system works. Charity only goes one way. They are going to invent new rules to prosecute Trump and then turn around and say that nobody else needs to worry, their crimes don't actually account, everybody is fair and equal before the law... They'll invent all sorts of rationalizations and reasons. There will be reasons for everything. They will ask you to believe them.
Except for the instances when they can. Remember the OPM hack, aka Chinese getting the personal data of every government worker in the US, and everybody who ever undergone a security check, and their friends and relatives? I am still fascinated of the absolute absence of interest to this from pretty much everybody - like China having all private information of all US government is no big deal at all.
I disagree. She made a very smart decision - to circumvent every and all disclosure rules, created to supervise government workers, and she was successful in this. Of course, full success would be if nobody ever found about it at all, and the materials she wanted to hide just disappeared without a trace, but the second best was actually what happened - what she wanted to delete was deleted, what she wanted to hide was hidden, and she did not suffer any prosecution for it. If anything, she made it into a PR campaign - she is as brazen as to sell merchandise with "but her emails" written on it - she literally is marketing her own criminal behavior. This is not a behavior of a stupid person, this is a behavior of a brazen and arrogant criminal secure in her knowledge that she is untouchable.
There is very little similarity between Hillary and Trump cases. Hillary created a system to hide information from legitimate oversight - one crime (or, rather, one set of crimes), and that system likely also was insecure - second crime. The first crime had clear intent, while the second can be argued as criminal negligence (which does not require intent), since she did not specifically intend for the documents to be disclosed.
With Trump, there's a disagreement between whether or not the documents that Trump possessed are allowed for him to possess or not. While the President is supposed to be the ultimate authority in what is secret or not, I am not a lawyer, so I could imagine there are some technicalities that he should have gone through and he didn't, because he's Trump. It is, however, very clear that he did not intend to hide these documents from oversight or destroy them because they contained information he wanted to hide, and neither he did it in a manner that would be criminally negligent (despite all the photos with the boxes next to the toilet - the question is not about the toilet, but about who gets to be there and handle the boxes. There's nothing inherently insecure in the presence of the toilet, however bizarre it may look out of context) and expose them to disclosure. Very little in common between the two cases except they are both concerning documents.
And we know how it works because for example they said FISA surveillance would only be used in extreme cases against violent foreign terrorists, and they kept their promise. Oh wait, they didn't eve try...
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I think the FBI basically concluded something very similar to what you and I are both saying, in fact, which is not actually that far apart.
A few key quotes from the actual statement:
Was there deliberate deletion? Seems not (they also reviewed the attorney process and found that basically it was just lazy and not very particular, using mostly header searches, thus not consistent with behavior trying to hide specific stuff)
Was the rule-breaking willful? No, but "extremely careless".
Should she have known better for certain conversations? Yes. I think your comment is right on the money about this point!!!
But let's take a step back. I am in total agreement that it was monumentally stupid of her. But Hillary used a freaking BlackBerry. She wasn't that tech savvy. She ignored warnings about it being insecure. And as far as I can tell, they just discussed classified topics, with occasional lower level (confidential) copy-pasting going on, they weren't attaching fully marked documents.. I also don't think she really did the majority of her regular work via email either, like most of us do. It's not like 100% of her communications were through email like today they might be.
Was it hacked ever? No direct evidence, but didn't expect any, so hard to say. They use the phrase "possible":
So does it meet the standard I propose, of "willful"? What about similar cases? The FBI here outlines four key areas that can help decide. THIS is the critical paragraph. Emphasis mine:
While Hillary lied to the public a lot about the facts, she didn't lie to investigators about it. Thus no obstruction allegation. This is a key difference when comparing the Trump case, in addition to the "willful" aspect which is applicable to his actions after the Archives directly asked for the classified stuff back. That's why I made a comparison to "criminal negligence", which you seem to think is grounds for prosecution. I think that's a fair opinion to have, but ultimately a bad idea. Like in plane crashes, it's often best to allow immunity in these cases and focus on improving processes to learn from the mistakes and make sure it doesn't happen again. Which would have been the case if Trump had not been so incredibly prideful so as to refuse to return things and attempt to hide them when officially
askedtold to. She gave bad excuses, but not horrible ones. Avoiding FOIA requests is borderline illegal to illegal but not as severe a violation. Personal convenience was cited (she didn't want to give up her BlackBerry or use several phones).The above just lays out explicitly what we already know: A run of the mill employee might be charged, but civilian heads of department and top leaders get a bit more leeway. That's not super great, but also understandable. Also, it's important to ask-- were the people around her careful (i.e. was she an anomaly? No. She wasn't too abnormal. Just an old person who hates change and dislikes personal convenience.
In summary: None of these reasons apply to Trump. I think it's totally appropriate and also consistent with the past to have him charged, found guilty, and then given a slap on the wrist type of sentence (or have the current President pardon him, only at that stage, similar to what happened with Nixon.)
Uh... I'll point to here. At best, Clinton's contractor willfully deleted e-mails three weeks after receiving a document retention request, and her chief of staff issued a deletion policy that violated the Federal Records Act. Which would only be a problem for this unnamed Platte River Networks employee and and Clinton's Chief of Staff. But they weren't prosecuted, either.
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There are different types of plane crashes. There are crashes caused by a malfunction in the plane systems, there are crashes caused by human error, and there are crashes caused by somebody deliberately directing a plane into the World Trade Center. Arguing that the latter should be handled by "improving the processes" and the direct perpetrators should be excused because with better planes and better buildings we could avoid all that would be insane. The behavior of Clinton was very deliberate and deliberately aimed at circumventing established laws and procedures. There's no "improving processes" that can deal with a person that deliberately chooses to not use the existing processes. You could claim "she did it just for convenience" (though the BleachBit part reveals it to be a lie, deleting anything on a server under data preservation request is a crime per se, but even without that it requires very motivated credulity to believe) but a crime made for one's convenience does not become less crime, it is still deliberate behavior to violate the law, not an accident.
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This is delusional. The people prosecuting Donald Trump are not going through all this trouble just to give him a slap on the wrist. You have a seriously warped perspective about what is going on.
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