Report: FBI moves to interview Clinton over emails
thehill.com
thehill.com
If we treat her differently because of her name and her connections we call into question the very rule of law in this country. Maybe Anarchists would rejoice in such an outcome as proof of the utter corruption and uselessness of our justice system, but people who care about law and justice certainly shouldn't applaud it.
In her defense I agree that the security policies were silly and didn't actually increase security enough to warrant the disruption. I can totally understand that someone wouldn't want to comply.
On the other hand she was the goddamned Secretary of State, the person who should be most concerned about protecting information security in the State Department. Rather than thinking like a leader and working to set a policy that is both secure and usable she simply ignored the rules she didn't like.
Aside from questions of prosecution this behavior causes me to seriously question her ability to lead. If you had to classify her behavior in this case would you put in the category of things a leader does or things a petulant child does?
If I read the LA Times article (http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-clinton-email-probe-2016...) which the main article links to; running a personal email server and using it for official business was not illegal at the time for mrs. Clinton.
Yet there is "roughly a dozen" FBI agents on the case.
Why would that be if it is slamduck that nothing illegal was going on?
One would assume that that would be one of the outcomes of this investigation. B
Are they merely protecting a political allied? Can the current democratic administration delay the prosecution until after the presidential election or have I been watching house of cards too much?
I understand these questions are heavily political and touchy subjects; but I am just trying to understand what is going on. I really don't have an opinion on American politics.
Clinton is probably not legally eligible to be Vice President --- a position that, were he to occupy it, would give him no authority over any prosecution (except possibly an impeachment trial --- over which he would preside, but not control).
Clinton is definitely not eligible to serve as President, even if he is the Vice President at the time his President is impeached. The next in succession after VP would be sworn in as President.
Where is there informed, intelligent, valuable discussion of politics? I'd love to find it.
If it grows and that isn't enough to keep it respectful, I will add a $1-2 signup fee for new users.
I'm also going to be spending most of my time recruiting quality people to join the discussions.
But how to promote quality? One thing I would like to see is a forum that cracks down on thoughtless posts, especially hyperbole ad rants. It's not only a waste of time but that kind of behavior spreads like a virus.
Quality is hard. I don't think there's any silver bullet, but you can check out the community guidelines at discoverboard.com/about which hope to curtail the thoughtlessness you're talking about.
/s
> Clinton is definitely not eligible to serve as President
This has never been established. The 22nd Amendment prevents him from being elected President.
Subsections (a), (b), and (d) [every succession category] of this section shall apply only to such officers as are eligible to the office of President under the Constitution.
"In case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President."
No caveats.
Edit:
There are a couple ways to become president, and only one of them is through an election. Article 2 talks about "eligibility", but says nothing on term limits. Amendment XII only says "eligible" again. Amendment XXII brings up term limits, but only says "elected", never "eligible".
There's a "but obviously..." reply to be made, but I see plenty of opportunity to play word games here.
I don't think that the First Husband would have clemency powers ;)
"But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."
It would seem the Constitution agrees with you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelfth_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
Bill, way back in the 1990s before the testimony that caused all the problems, said that their only goal was to ask him damaging things under oath and then leak his responses or prosecute him for perjury. Remember that Bill was not testifying in a case about Lewinksy, but in an unrelated case regarding Paula Jones. But once he was under oath they just used it as a fishing expedition to achieve political ends.
Is this how we want our democracy to work? Probably law enforcement can find something to justify prosecuting or at least investigating anyone.
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EDIT: It turns out FBI Director Comey has a history investigating the Clintons:
Comey’s first brush with them came when Bill Clinton was president. Looking to get back into government after a stint in private practice, Comey signed on as deputy special counsel to the Senate Whitewater Committee. In 1996, after months of work, Comey came to some damning conclusions: Hillary Clinton was personally involved in mishandling documents and had ordered others to block investigators as they pursued their case. Worse, her behavior fit into a pattern of concealment: she and her husband had tried to hide their roles in two other matters under investigation by law enforcement. Taken together, the interference by White House officials, which included destruction of documents, amounted to “far more than just aggressive lawyering or political naiveté,” Comey and his fellow investigators concluded. It constituted “a highly improper pattern of deliberate misconduct.”
Comey parlayed the Whitewater job into top posts in Virginia and New York, returning to Manhattan in 2002 to be the top federal prosecutor there. One of his first cases as a line attorney in the same office 15 years earlier had been the successful prosecution of Marc Rich, a wealthy international financier, for tax evasion. But on his last day as President in 2001, Bill Clinton pardoned Rich. “I was stunned,” Comey later told Congress. As top U.S. prosecutor in New York in 2002, appointed by George W. Bush, Comey inherited the criminal probe into the Rich pardon and 175 others Clinton had made at the 11th hour.
Despite evidence that several pardon recipients, including Rich, had connections to donations to Bill Clinton’s presidential library and Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, Comey found no criminal wrongdoing.
If that is not what you're saying, please phrase it clearly and directly, and not by implying.
Of course I'd prefer a completely trustworthy person as president, but such people don't exist. I think law enforcement can find a reason to investigate anyone, including any candidate or President; once an investigation starts, it can be used as a fishing expedition and lead anywhere, for the reasons I described above. That's a risk to our democracy; law enforcement could have a veto, to a degree, over the American people's choices.
By the way, let's tone it down. By your demands, one might think I'm the one being deposed.
Only the little people are not allowed to lie.
It's surprising that "law enforcement officials" would be sharing details about this incredibly high profile case, but only with a reporter for AJAM, a channel that is in its last weeks on the air. And that presented with such a big scoop, Al Jazeera apparently hasn't even bothered to post an article about it to their website. So there's just an unofficial clip of what the reporter said on the air in a brief report floating around. Not saying it's false... it's just very thinly sourced.
That's not a range.
In theory the author could have tried to unify those points on the same number line with the same sig figs, but I'm not even sure what the rules are for ranges built from two separate calculations. If there even is a rule you'd get something like "range from 10 to 50" and only math geeks would have a clear picture of what those zeroes really mean, and even they would've lost the "not 50" and "quite possibly less than 10" information the existing phrasing provides.
Pure speculation, of course, but man would I like to be a fly on THAT wall...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/aarons-law-reintroduce...
Source? Everyone familiar with the law seems to disagree.
Honestly, Clinton should at a minimum be banned from handling classified information in the future.
That sounds like a good idea for many more politicians of this world.
We need less classified information, not less access to it.
Otherwise it is a threat to democracy. The FBI would essentially choose the next president if they took down one of the two nominees. Consider that they could do that in any election, federal, state or local. Also consider that the FBI's employees are, as far as I know, overwhelmingly Republican, and that in the past the FBI has illicitly tried to influence politics (under J. Edgar Hoover, for example).
Even now they are letting this go on much too long and exercising far too much influence. Crimes should be investigated appropriately; I don't think candidates should get a pass. I do question whether the investigation is out of proportion to the crime; many use personal email for official business and many mishandle classified info (including multiple past CIA directors) with no significant penalty.
Nor should their opposition have the power to delay proceedings until such a time as it is politically advantageous to them. This should have been dealt with last year.