Yep, 30,000 emails and not one was classified. There's also a difference between not having sufficient security on confidential emails, and actively showing classified military information to a publisher.
Youre right and I was mistemembering. That said, mens rea is a required element for prosecuting basically all crimes. Also, again, there's a difference between confidential emails that don't have sufficiently secure servers, and classified military documents shared with a publisher.
Actually, a couple things on this:
A) when the FBI searched Anthony Weiner’s laptop, they found forensic evidence of emails Clinton had sent to Weiner’s wife, which
did turn out to include classified information. That was why Comey ended up having to announce in October that there was in fact more to the story.
B) The Espionage Act doesn’t take into account
mens rea; whether you meant to do harm or not is irrelevant. Comey tried to invent a nonexistent standard to cover for Clinton, hoping most people wouldn’t notice the lie. And with classified info, there
are special handling rules.
At a minimum, she should have been hit with charges for defying a subpoena herself; that she wasn’t is because she was being given the kid glove treatment by Obama’s DOJ. However, she would then have had a possible defense to say that Obama himself knew about it and had technically declassified them (since Obama turned out to also be on some of those emails from her own server). So legally she might have been in the clear, but it was very clear nobody wanted to discuss the potential scandal
that would have created.
It's always good to keep one's facts straight. The point of the audio isn't to demonstrate that that particular document was among the ones he refused to return when asked (the charges are, as is commonly the case, more about the coverup than the initial incident) but rather to demonstrate that he was fully aware of the fact that he had not declassified the classified documents he took home.
I don't think they charged him exactly for having classified documents but the fact that they were classified is material to the charges they did file and the events that (allegedly) transpired.
Correct. They had to make the distinction because otherwise everyone would cotton onto it being a selective prosecution (and don’t get me wrong, it absolutely is) and wonder why Biden and Clinton weren’t also put in jail.
