Estonut wrote:
For a smart guy, you sure are an idiot. Clinton committed several crimes.
Having worked with highly classified information for my entire career, I know something about this subject. Security violations do occur. We're all human and make mistakes. Consequences range from a warning to removal of security clearances and firing. The only violations prosecuted as crimes are intentionally revealing classified information to an uncleared person.
Clinton's worst violation was this:
Director Comey wrote:
Seven e-mail chains concern matters that were classified at the Top Secret/Special Access Program level when they were sent and received. These chains involved Secretary Clinton both sending e-mails about those matters and receiving e-mails from others about the same matters. There is evidence to support a conclusion that any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding about these matters, should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.
While classification levels are sometimes murky (so many of Clinton's unclassified emails were classified later) the difference between Special Access and unclassified is obvious. Anyone who's had a security briefing knows that if you read an email like that on an unclassified system, you must report it, and you definitely can't reply or forward it.
Estonut wrote:
Comey's conclusions gave the impression that intent was a component of those crimes. It is not.
As Comey says, "Our investigation looked at whether there is evidence classified information was improperly stored or transmitted on that personal system, in violation of a federal statute making it a felony to mishandle classified information either intentionally or in a grossly negligent way, or a second statute making it a misdemeanor to knowingly remove classified information from appropriate systems or storage facilities." So intent is very important. Like I said (and so does Comey), nobody is ever criminally prosecuted for unintentional security violations. But even if they won't "lock her up," her carelessness and dismissive attitude deserved to be campaign issues.
Another fact that's overlooked: Clinton made a huge mistake when she used a private server, because otherwise nobody would have known about the problem. But legally, transmitting classified information on the unclassified State Department system would have been just as bad. And using a commercial email service would have been worse, because it isn't possible to sanitize the system after a violation is discovered.
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