In a single election year? I don't think it could have, because a vice presidential candidate being declared before the party candidate was decided was unprecedented.
Really interesting think-piece on how the media and people in general think about and treat Hillary Clinton. I don't know if the author is correct, I don't even know if it's possible to prove the author's hypothesis, but it's still a good read:
A couple weeks ago, I posted a link to a very well thought-out think piece from Michael Arnovitz about Hillary Clinton. This is his also very well thought-out follow-up:
For the curious: USC 641 is embezzling from the government, 793 and 794 is selling or otherwise giving military secrets to foreign powers(The former in general, the latter specifically in the intentional aid of), 952 is importation of controlled substances(As in drug trafficking.) The only one that's even vaguely relevant and not super crazy person conspiracy bullshit is USC 1924, a misdemeanor, which they've already said they're not going to charge her under, and even if they did, basically every legal expert worth their salt and with a grounding on the topic has already said it's got essentially zero chance of ever actually sticking.
Man, I'm seeing a lot of Bernie fans pretty deliberately misrepresenting FBI director Comey's remarks, and pretending that he said she's guilty as sin but won't be charged because she's above the law, rather than what he actually said, which is that while they thought it quite careless, they found no evidence that she actually broke the law at any point.
More importantly that the lack of law on this issue prevents past and present accountability.
I'm not sure how you mean? Even if the law didn't cover this - which it does, and she's still not guilty of anything - new laws of that type rarely cover offenses retroactively.
Rep Gowdy speaks about how hard it is to prove intent, he's not strictly wrong, but in this case, he's also being disingenuous - you can't prove her intent, but you can certainly prove through circumstantial evidence that it was more likely than not what her intentions were. Not to mention, you don't have to prove her literal, actual intent - the definition of intent within the law is different, and somewhat broader.
To blatantly steal the wikipedia example because it's 4AM and I'm super lazy right now, say you intend to burn down someone's house, because they did you wrong. You don't intend to kill them, just destroy their house - after all, you're mad, but not killing mad. So, you grab your petrol cans, you swing by late at night on a weeknight, set a nice big fire, and off you trot, and leave it to the neighbours to call the cops - except, the guy who wronged you is, unbeknownst to you, at home. Poor bastard burns to death, you're absolutely horrified, you never meant to kill them at any point, you could not be more sorry, you could not have intended this outcome less.
Well, according to the law, you're probably still a murderer, despite not having the explicit intent to kill, because a reasonable person would have the foresight to think that they would likely be home late at night, and you didn't even attempt to check, nor warn them. Therefore, with the test of intent and foresight, a reasonable person would have assumed it likely the person was home when you started the fire, you made no attempt to ensure there wasn't or that they'd be out if they were, and made no attempt to call any assistance, thus what was simply recklessness on your part is converted to the malice aforethought required for murder.
Same situation, except the guy was on holiday, you checked, made sure, had every reason to know - but you didn't know he'd got someone to house-sit for him, and they died in the fire instead. In that case, you're not a murderer - because it's considered recklessness rather than intent, because the court decides it's more probable, since you checked to see if the guy was home, showing at least some intent not to kill, but had no knowledge of the house-sitter being present.
For examples more related to the case, if she kept the documents past the end of her time as secretary of state, or if she made copies of the documents to keep, it would be trivially easy to prove, or if she'd exclusively used the server for one type of communication she wanted to keep secret, while still using the state department system for others, failed to comply with requests or requirements, if she'd tried to keep it wholly secret from the department, just for a few examples of how you could prove intent or things that could contribute to it.
Not having a precedent doesn't mean they don't know how to prosecute it - after all, while there's no precedent for a Secretary of State being charged for this, that's not surprising - there's only been four secretaries of state since the advent of email, other than herself: John Kerry, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, with Powell being the only one to make any serious use of it - who, as has been noted many times before, also kept a private server.
But aside from that, there's no shortage of people who have been punished under USC 1924, or any of the other applicable laws, nor any shortage of people within that group who did so electronically. They know how to prosecute it, because they've done so many times before - just not to an ex-Secretary of State.
It's also worth noting that the Representative making that statement, Trey Gowdy, is also a Tea Party republican, and one of the biggest hard-chargers both on the email scandal, and the Benghazi scandal. Who, during the Benghazi hearings, was caught modifying some of Clinton's emails he was presenting as evidence, at first claiming that they were redacted by the CIA because they were classified, but was later discovered to(and subsequently admitted to) have performed all of the redactions himself(and needless to say, without the instruction or knowledge of any department responsible for enforcing classification), and the information was not actually classified.
Comments
https://medium.com/@michaelarnovitz/thinking-about-hillary-a-follow-up-2e01a963a632#.uj991kt0f
For the curious: USC 641 is embezzling from the government, 793 and 794 is selling or otherwise giving military secrets to foreign powers(The former in general, the latter specifically in the intentional aid of), 952 is importation of controlled substances(As in drug trafficking.) The only one that's even vaguely relevant and not super crazy person conspiracy bullshit is USC 1924, a misdemeanor, which they've already said they're not going to charge her under, and even if they did, basically every legal expert worth their salt and with a grounding on the topic has already said it's got essentially zero chance of ever actually sticking.
Listen from 4:30
Let me retract. At 5:10 He says there's no precedent for prosecution...
What I took from that is, they don't know how to prosecute with the current laws.
Rep Gowdy speaks about how hard it is to prove intent, he's not strictly wrong, but in this case, he's also being disingenuous - you can't prove her intent, but you can certainly prove through circumstantial evidence that it was more likely than not what her intentions were. Not to mention, you don't have to prove her literal, actual intent - the definition of intent within the law is different, and somewhat broader.
To blatantly steal the wikipedia example because it's 4AM and I'm super lazy right now, say you intend to burn down someone's house, because they did you wrong. You don't intend to kill them, just destroy their house - after all, you're mad, but not killing mad. So, you grab your petrol cans, you swing by late at night on a weeknight, set a nice big fire, and off you trot, and leave it to the neighbours to call the cops - except, the guy who wronged you is, unbeknownst to you, at home. Poor bastard burns to death, you're absolutely horrified, you never meant to kill them at any point, you could not be more sorry, you could not have intended this outcome less.
Well, according to the law, you're probably still a murderer, despite not having the explicit intent to kill, because a reasonable person would have the foresight to think that they would likely be home late at night, and you didn't even attempt to check, nor warn them. Therefore, with the test of intent and foresight, a reasonable person would have assumed it likely the person was home when you started the fire, you made no attempt to ensure there wasn't or that they'd be out if they were, and made no attempt to call any assistance, thus what was simply recklessness on your part is converted to the malice aforethought required for murder.
Same situation, except the guy was on holiday, you checked, made sure, had every reason to know - but you didn't know he'd got someone to house-sit for him, and they died in the fire instead. In that case, you're not a murderer - because it's considered recklessness rather than intent, because the court decides it's more probable, since you checked to see if the guy was home, showing at least some intent not to kill, but had no knowledge of the house-sitter being present.
For examples more related to the case, if she kept the documents past the end of her time as secretary of state, or if she made copies of the documents to keep, it would be trivially easy to prove, or if she'd exclusively used the server for one type of communication she wanted to keep secret, while still using the state department system for others, failed to comply with requests or requirements, if she'd tried to keep it wholly secret from the department, just for a few examples of how you could prove intent or things that could contribute to it.
Not having a precedent doesn't mean they don't know how to prosecute it - after all, while there's no precedent for a Secretary of State being charged for this, that's not surprising - there's only been four secretaries of state since the advent of email, other than herself: John Kerry, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Madeleine Albright, with Powell being the only one to make any serious use of it - who, as has been noted many times before, also kept a private server.
But aside from that, there's no shortage of people who have been punished under USC 1924, or any of the other applicable laws, nor any shortage of people within that group who did so electronically. They know how to prosecute it, because they've done so many times before - just not to an ex-Secretary of State.
It's also worth noting that the Representative making that statement, Trey Gowdy, is also a Tea Party republican, and one of the biggest hard-chargers both on the email scandal, and the Benghazi scandal.
Who, during the Benghazi hearings, was caught modifying some of Clinton's emails he was presenting as evidence, at first claiming that they were redacted by the CIA because they were classified, but was later discovered to(and subsequently admitted to) have performed all of the redactions himself(and needless to say, without the instruction or knowledge of any department responsible for enforcing classification), and the information was not actually classified.
Full remarks.
And that money shot, after the shit they've spent the entire campaign talking:
When asked for comment, 538 Whiz Kid Harry Enten remarked "Please stop emailing me. Please."