No. of Recommendations: 7
It is that Clinton simply thumbed her nose at the rules (with NO consequences), specifically ignoring the requirement to conduct government business on a secure government server. The fact that some Republicans did that same thing back when is not an excuse.
I don't think it's offered as an excuse; it's offered to support the argument that the behavior isn't criminal. If lots of people are engaged in the same sort of behavior and none of them are being prosecuted, that's supportive evidence that the behavior isn't a criminal violation. That "poor sailor," on the other hand, clearly violated a criminal statute.
This happens in a lot of different fields - I won't be the first to note that it's easier to send someone to jail for stealing a TV than "stealing" a million dollars through issuing mortgage-backed securities. That's largely because criminal statutes on theft of physical property are much clearer and easier to apply than those regarding financial crimes, where the edges of prohibited behavior are far murkier.
If I got a subpoena to preserve all the files on my laptop and then deleted half them before giving it to law enforcement, I would expect to be prosecuted for non-compliance.
Sure. But that's not what happened in l'affaire Clinton. Clinton (or rather her team) gave direction to have the emails deleted before the subpoena was issued, and the subpoena was from Congress and not a law enforcement agency. The latter point means that deleting the emails was likely not a criminal act, and the former means that Clinton (as opposed to anyone else) couldn't be guilty of doing anything wrong because she didn't delete the emails after a subpoena was issued.
Again, this goes back to what we talked about before - not just on the law, but on the facts of the situation there were a lot of incorrect claims that no one in the conservative media sphere had any incentive to correct. "Lock her up!"
In a significant case, if I filed a contrived document I knew to be false with the court, I should and would be prosecuted. With Comey, not so much.
Why would you expect to be prosecuted? Unless the document is one where there are criminal penalties for it being false, you wouldn't have committed a crime. Lawyers filing false documents with a court are, of course, subject to a wide variety of sanctions - but they're generally professional sanctions (up to and including disbarment). Only if you're under oath would a lie be prosecutable.
And, of course, even if your false statement were made under oath perjury is a notoriously difficult crime to prosecute, because it's not enough to prove the statement was false. You have to prove that the defendant knew it was false, and wasn't simply mistaken. That's really hard to do, especially when upper-level people are relying on information provided to them by lower-level folks. Hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt what someone actually had in their head.
BTW, what about the lack of prosecutions emanating Jeffery Epstein's Pedophile Island? Politicized FBI, that's why. If not that, then what else explains it?
The fact that they don't have any evidence that could support another charge?
It's ridiculously hard to prosecute criminal cases after a decade unless you've got a witness pointing to a specific defendant to file charges against. Ghislaine Maxwell was prosecuted and put away for a very long time. But there were victims who were willing to testify against her. After her, who? Other than general allegations that people other than Epstein and Maxwell were involved, who's the next defendant? You can't just charge people who went there - you need evidence that they committed some crime.
We have Epstein victims who were willing to say in court that Epstein molested them and that Ghislaine participated in the scheme. There may be many more victims of Epstein and Ghislaine - but one's dead, and the other's in jail. If there's going to be any other prosecutions, you need someone who was victimized by someone else.
