I thought ignorance of the law wasn't a defense.

She could NOT violate a law that DOES NOT APPLY to her!

 

Yes, it DOES!

 

Why does that law not apply to her?

Where does it say that?

 

Ignorance may or may not be a defense according to the elements of a specific crime, but any prosecutor worth his salt, knows when defense counsel will employ it regardless and when the facts of the case are so wishy washy, that his real bosses will demand proof of a guilty or knowing mind, namely the general public and the potential jurors he is likely to get.

 

This law requires corrupt intent, mishandling of DoD material only requires gross negligence

 

They aren't. Donnie J was told in no uncertain terms he would receive help to get his Dad elected from the Russian government in the form of dirt on Hillary. He eagerly accepted the offer and attended a meeting fully expecting to receive the info. The e-mails between Donnie J and Goldstone prove this conclusively.

 

Chalupa and Nuland DID eagerly receive dirt on Paul Manafort. In fact traveled to Ukraine to collect it. Hillary's campaign decided the best was to profit from it, was to have Manafort investigated by the FBI ang get a free MSM smear. Don jr might have had ideas along those same lines. Besides, Don jr, Kushner, Manafort don't have Article II immunity ... why wouldn't Mueller indict them, when all 3 confessed?

 

You say “only”, but gross negligence is actually a very high bar.

 

Did you hear the one about Hillary, the pizza parlor, and the child abuse ring? They will be locking her up for that one any time now.
Chalupa and Nuland were behind the whole thing but their cloak of invisibility saved them.
Perhaps you need to tighten that tin foil hat.

 

True, but less the corrupt intent

 

I have a theory on this, having read the statute and its history, when this was all big news . If you read the sections surrounding it, there are references to mental state/ intent all over the place, but in this specific narrow section under which Clinton could be charged there is not. I thought it odd. Why leave it out here? But then I thought back to when these statutes were written.

Its the 70's and communism is still THE enemy. Its the era of Castro, the KGB, and our intelligence agencies need a tool in law under which to bring and prosecute suspected spies, and their 'helpers' in our state department, in our department of defense. So they bring this 'gross negligence' language sans any intent, into a subcommittee on intelligence in just this section. Did they really want to prosecute and send people to prison because they left a document sitting on their desk and the office unlocked? Did they really want serious time for honest loyal Americans who stupidly, very stupidly went off the lunch with a file available on a chair for a secretary to see? I don't think so. I think they wanted leverage because they did not - for one minute - believe it was accidental that the document was sitting on that chair or the file was resting on a chair. Well its not rocket science to defense counsel that there isn't any witness on the list or document in a discovery motion designed to show intent or mental state.

Leverage to turn states evidence, only comes with a charge somewhere on the books absent that legal requirement. So that is what Congress gave them. That 'gross negligence' language in that section was a compromise allowing them to sweat a lowly staffer they supposed knew more, and offer a plea deal against prison time.

Nobody seriously thinks that Clinton was more than foolish, ignorant, and rather obstinate about doing this the same way she always had, using a server that was convenient for her to get her work done. I doubt this language was put there by Congress to prosecute foolish ignorant or obstinate secretary's of state who's criminal intent was to work late into the night on or with their emails. I think it well within prosecutorial discretion to consider more than the letter of the statute may allow, when that leads to an almost absurd misuse of resources and waste of time. The chances of conviction are slim, the costs are high and even the hoped for end result is dubious.

 

When asked about the server, Hilary said she was trying to figure out how send and receive emails and the server was the quickest and simplest way. There are literally hundreds of servers, some free, some of which you would have to pay for the service. Getting access to them takes just a few minutes. There was also the government sytem. Installing and setting up a server is much more complicated and time consuming. She knew what she was doing. She wanted a system which she could control..

 

She was old school. She wanted a system she already understood and could access conveniently. That inevitably translates to a feeling of control. We all want to feel we can have some modicum of control over our emails and data instead of somebody in a IT department. Its a luxury we simply cannot afford, if we work in state secrets in an age of state sponsored hacking efforts.

 

Nothing she did amounted to gross negligence. And she certainly didn’t demonstrate intent to reveal government secrets. It was an UNCLASSIFIED server meant to handle only UNCLASSIFIED emails. The record shows that she and her staff took the same caution with emails sent to the server that they would have taken sending emails to her EQUALLY UNCLASSIFIED government email address. The fact that some material later determined to be classified ended up in her emails is more an indictment of the classification system than any evidence of intent or gross negligence on her part.

Stop beating this dead horse already.

 

Comey called it Gross Negligence. Strzok changed it to extremely careless. How is it an indictment of the classification system?

 

That was the language in an early draft of his statement. Any reason we should prefer that draft to the final draft? After all, the reason you have successive drafts of a document is because the early drafts aren’t quite right.

 

Changed by Strzok who preferred Hilary to be president than Trump.

Again, how is that an indictment of the classification system?

 

Ignorance of the law is not a legal defense, You can't be found "not guilty by reason of ignorance and stupidity"

 

You are now assuming motive, and also ignoring that Comey signed off on the final draft. The final draft is really the only draft that counts.

Because nearly all the classified material that ended up on the server was either not classified at the time it was sent, or was classified by some other agency that Clinton and her aides were unaware of, or was so picayune that it shouldn’t have been classified in the first place. The government has a serious overclassification problem, so much so that it is almost impossible for someone at Clinton’s level to do their job efficiently and avoid getting “classified” material mixed into their unclassified stuff.

 

Some people are more consistent in their political loyalty than their legal principles

 

Not assuming anything. Strzok changed it to extremely careless. It is well documented. And he preferred Hilary over Trump.

"Not classified at the time" indicates misunderstanding. No one had assigned a classification. The subject and material was already classified.

That is generally something which is said by someone who does not understand the system. The classification system has thee categories. Confidential, secret and top secret. There are others, but that is a whole new ballgame. You put enough confidential material in one pile and it can be potentially top secret because all those little secrets can combine to tell the whole picture, but by themselves are not very informative. In many ways, the security system is all about money. It costs money to classify and handle classified. It also costs money for an adversary to get access to our information. The objective is to make it a lot more expensive for that adversary to get access to our classified than it is for us to protect it. Many times a very minor item is classified because it would allow an adversary know that there something out there which is worth going after.

 

So the new, new absurd and false assumption, is that Trump and his campaign wanted to collude with Russians, but were to ignorant about how to go about it?

And yet you voted for Hilary who pretended to be completely ignorant, the entire four years that she was the SECSTATE.

But I'll leave you to play your what-if games, because your day of grace is going to be short lived. Just a few weeks from now, investigations will slowly start releasing their findings, and the felonious corruption and abuse of political office by Obama and his administration will come out.

 

From Comey's famous July 5th public statement where he listed Hilary's felonies, and ended saying Obama won't prosecute Hilary:

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The reality of his last comment, was addressed later on:

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. In addition to this highly sensitive information, we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail (that is, excluding the later “up-classified” e-mails).

So she knew they were classified by the very nature of their source, but she mishandled them, anyway.

 

Couldn't say it better myself.

 

Or you could just master the PF search function to avoid looking even more foolish than usual. There was a thread devoted to this topic. https://www.politico.eu/article/ukrainian-efforts-to-sabotage-trump-backfire/