Timelordwho wrote:
someproteinguy wrote:
So basically she did a bunch of illegal stuff, but everyone else was doing it too, so she isn't going to face any punishment? That has to be about as close to a 'worst possible outcome' as you can get without someone dying.
What she did was not illegal, it was just a total disregard for security that would have been adequate reason to fire or restrict clearances for any gov't or ancillary contracted employee, and in no way absolves other employees from participating.
The problem is that there are two parts of the statute. One involving intent, the other involving "gross negligence". The director called her actions "extreme carelessness" (which is more or less synonymous). He effectively said that she did, in fact, violate the law, and fell back to the idea that a "reasonable prosecutor" would not move forward with a case. Um... For actual legal reasons? Or for political reasons? I think a heck of a lot of people are going to think the latter, and not the former. Others have been indicated for far less. CIA director John Deutch was convicted for more or less the same thing Clinton did (and was, ironically, pardoned by then president Clinton before he served any time). He also had no intent to disseminate classified information, but merely made a "mistake" by storing them on his personal computer which was connected to the internet (so, more or less the exact same thing Clinton did, only back in 1996, when one might be more easily forgiven for making such a mistake).
To not even charge her sends a massively negative message about our legal system and raises the idea of protected political classes and corruption to the forefront.
It was also, at the least, an "odd" statement (she's guilty, but we don't think anyone will want to prosecute? Really?). And while I'm sure the usual wagon circlers will do what they do, I suspect that in an election cycle where the opposition is more or less running on Washington being "broken", this is going to add fuel to that fire. The whole setup over the last week just looks fishy. Lynch conveniently pre-stating that she'd abide with whatever the FBI recommended (which, let's face it, she would not say unless she already knew what the recommendation would be), making any DoJ inaction appear to be just following an appropriate lead (recall that the DoJ is not limited to pressing charges only when the FBI recommends doing so). The timing of the whole thing over the holiday weekend. The statement by the FBI immediately followed by a freaking massive political rallly by Clinton, with Obama in attendance (and long, with a silly amount of coverage today). It all seems very well designed to limit the degree to which the masses will be exposed to any analysis of the FBI report itself (great smoke screen in other words). I would not be surprised at all to see some other timed media event in the next day or two just to add to the muddle, in fact.
It's pretty obvious that the Clinton and Obama knew this was coming, scheduled the timing of the release of the information, and planned other media events around it to minimize the damage. Which speaks volumes to the point I made above. A large percentage of people are not going to see the FBI results as a clearing of Clinton's name, but an example of corrupt and unequal justice in our legal system. So anything they can do to distract the masses from it is their best plan. If they really thought everyone would cheer at Clinton being cleared, they'd have made the FBI statement the focus of everything, and moved on it massively. They aren't. They're doing everything they can to just move past it, declare it old news, nothing to see here, etc.
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However, as she has already left the post there is no way to sanction her, as again, it isn't considered criminal negligence, or intentionally treasonous. The report also says it was highly likely that the server was hacked and read by foreign spies. It's basically fine in the same way Zimmerman did nothing wrong. Accidents just happen and there is nothing you can do about them.
That's not true at all. The report merely states that there's no conclusive evidence that it was hacked. Not proving it was hacked is not the same as proving it wasn't. You also have to understand that it's often impossible to tell if a system has been hacked months or years after the fact. Actually, it's pretty much always impossible. Doubly so, when the owner of said server intentionally doesn't keep backups of the data, and also intentionally deleted a ton of information off said server along the way. It's not like a file tells you that it's been copied by someone else who wasn't supposed to copy it. And datalogs of network activity would long long ago have been rotated over and lost to the bit bucket (typically, such logs rotate out after 7 days). And that's assuming anyone was actually running even moderate network/firewall logs.
Again. Absence of proof that her server was hacked is not proof it wasn't. The running assumption is that it almost certainly was. Many times over. There's just no way to know for sure how many times, and by whom. Um... Which is kinda precisely the reason why you're not supposed to keep classified government data on a private home computer. The crime isn't her handing over data to those who aren't supposed to have it, but in handling the data in a way that put said data at a high risk of being accessed by those who aren't supposed to have it. This idea that if she didn't intend for data to get outside classified circles, or that we can't prove that her careless handling of the data resulted in it getting outside classified circles, is a pure straw man. Neither of those are absolutely required to convict, much less indict her for the crime in question.
We're seeing the legal goalposts moved right in front of the public eye, and then watching most of the media falling over themselves to convince the public to just ignore the man behind the curtain. I'm not sure that's a great strategy this time around though. And frankly, I'm not sure which I'm more concerned with. A massive public outrage that results in anger-voting for Trump, or Clinton effectively getting away with it, and emboldening the next politician to do more of the same, and making the media less likely to report it or push on it, given that the bar has now been moved and they may be called hypocritical if they appear to be inconsistent in their future coverage of a similar event.
It's a bad thing anyway we go.
Edited, Jul 5th 2016 4:25pm by gbaji