In light of FBI Director James Comey’s admission that “no reasonable prosecutor” would be willing to try to bring charges against Hillary Clinton, there are some unanswered questions that need clarification. Despite Hillary’s well-publicized claims that she never sent or received classified information during her entire tenure as secretary of state (Why? Did no one trust her?), Comey noted that Hillary sent or received 110 emails that were classified, secret, or top secret at the time they were sent.
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Given this, how many other FBI cases have there been where they have over 110 pieces of evidence of violations of federal law but they opted not to prosecute?
Intention is a broader area than just sending state secrets through Russian email servers. Intention is the difference between manslaughter and murder.
Similarly, how many times, exactly, would she have needed to send classified, secret, and top secret information before it rose to the point of “intentional” — Was the threshold 111? 300? 500? 10,000? What’s the number of lawbreaking emails before unintentional blundering crosses into actual lawbreaking?
Comey said Hillary sent and received emails while in foreign countries. The way internet access works is you tap into a local connection, dozens of them along the way, to connect to your private email server back home in Chappaqua. If Hillary had simply handed a top-secret dossier to a Russian messenger, who passed it on to dozens of other Russian messengers, who passed it on to Ukrainian, Polish, German, Belgium, French, British, and Irish messengers, would that also have been okay?
Intention is a broader area than just sending state secrets through Russian email servers. Intention is the difference between manslaughter and murder. Does this mean manslaughter is no longer an offense? If so, this will be a relief to thousands of people who get drunk and drive every day. Perhaps they don’t intentionally mean to get drunk. And, if they do kill someone as they drive home, as long as they don’t do it intentionally, is that not prosecutable according to the FBI?
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Hillary hired someone to set up a private, unsecured (by government standards) email server at her private residence. All 110 classified emails passed through that server. Does hiring someone not show intent? I mean, can you hire someone who, oh, I don’t know, just happens to kill someone who knows damaging political secrets about you and not have that hiring come back to bite you? In other words, are deaths caused by hit men now to be considered “unintentional homicide”?
Speaking of hires, it came out recently that Hillary purposefully directed her subordinates to remove classified headers from the email system so they could sent it to her over an unsecured fax line. Did the FBI forget about this part of the case? Or is it a frequency issue again? You know, that she would have to accidentally given her subordinates direct orders to first remove a classified email from a secured email system and then remove classified headers to run it through an unsecured fax line, say, 150 times, before it rose to the level of intentional?
At what point, then, does intention come into play as a legal offense? Hillary intentionally led a war in Libya to overthrow a subdued dictator, but arms and munitions unintentionally ended up in the hands of Syrian rebels and even ISIS as a result of that invasion.
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At what point in that chain of intentional events did actions cross into an unintentional — and, according to the FBI, “not prosecutable” — gray area? If I understand the FBI’s thinking on this, it is bad to directly arm ISIS but if you first lead a war with no plan for the repercussions, and ISIS gets arms and munitions as part of the result, then that’s okay. I suppose that fits the DOJ’s thinking on this. After all, it was the DOJ that thought arming Mexican cartels through Operation Fast and Furious was okay, so long as the intention wasn’t really to arm them but to learn about their gun trafficking operation. After all, there haven’t been any prosecutions of federal officials who came up with that scheme and no one was ever fired.
So, to wrap up, if Hillary had just sent her 111th classified email over her Blackberry while driving drunk when she crashed her car through the wall of her Chappaqua mansion, killing the guy working on her server while simultaneously shorting out the very server she was sending them through — thus destroying the hard drives and interrupting Bill’s nooner in the same fell swoop — and then ordered her assistant to switch places with her behind the wheel, would she be prosecuted? Or would she just need to say, “I didn’t mean it”?
But what can you expect from the woman who invented the “I don’t recall” defense?
Mark Anderson holds a doctorate in Business Administration, is a business strategist, and the host of the “I Spy Radio Show” (www.ispyradio.com), Oregon’s 2nd largest radio network.
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