In a
post on The National Review, Andrew C. McCarthy writes about Hillary Clinton's deletion of "personal" emails from her time as secretary of state. McCarthy thinks Clinton should be punished for deleting "files without completing an inventory and enabling State
Department record retention officers to review her claim of privacy." According to 18 U.S.C. § 1001, it is a crime to falsify or withhold information from the federal government when such information is within its jurisdiction. Clinton did not allow the State Department to go through the documents before deleting them, instead she had a team of her own lawyers query the emails based on search terms that may have not been all inclusive. (More on that
here.) Even though she turned in for review 55,000 pages of emails, they could easily have been altered with little to no evidence because the original electronic files have been deleted. McCarthy goes on to state that Clinton's willful disregard to the aforementioned rules implies that she is in fact guilty of a federal crime.
McCarthy should know what he is talking about since he is a former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and had to go through the same sensitive information protocol that Clinton is going through now.
I agree with McCarthy on this issue. Had a normal (i.e. not politically tied to POTUS) citizen done the same thing, the DOJ would be all over it. I was bound by similar rules while in the Army. I've seen many people get hemmed up for unauthorized transmissions via government communication systems. The punishments were swift and brutal. The rules concerning government communication should be the same for everyone using the system, even Clinton. That being said, I really don't think anything will come from this. It will get swept under the rug and people will move on the next big controversy.
