Q99 wrote:Here's the thing- Hillary absolutely doesn't deserve to be in prison outside of 'Clinton Derangement syndrome' and the drumbeat of propaganda. Wanna know how many crimes she's been found guilty of in her life? Zero. Wanna know how many she's been charged with? Zero. She's never gotten off on technicalities or anything of the sort- she's had people look, investigate, and go, "Dudes, there's not enough here to say wrongdoing even happened." She's guilty of violating department policy in a way that harmed no-one and which the government never charges people over- not that you'd get that impression from the "more coverage than all policy issues combined," the media decided to give it. Her failure was not in what she'd done, but message control- and even that only to an extent since it took the FBI Director doing a gigantic breach of department policy 6 days before the election in order to make it happen.
I will nitpick one thing: the underlined.
A person of
merely ordinary standing within the State Department, or other government agencies, who violated the same department policy would indeed be in serious trouble and for all I know might well be charged.
However, this does not happen when the top-ranking leadership of the organization violates the same rule. And that is not going to change. The reason why that's not going to change isn't of Clinton's creation, and here's the reason.
(I am now speaking mostly to others, not to Q99)
...
The
reality is that the State and Defense departments, and others which handle sensitive information, are routinely led by people whose career background is as politicians, lawyers, outside consultants, and the like. This is a reality imposed by the nature of the way our government works: you don't become the tip-top of the Defense Department by promotion through the ranks, you get it by being one of the people the president wants on his* cabinet.
These are people who need not have experience handling classified information. Who have not necessarily received clearances through the normal process. The
de facto policy of the US government is to ignore all that, and trust that the Secretary of State is not in fact a spy funneling information to the outside world, or if they are, we're already screwed whether they handle classified documents properly or not.
Furthermore, both parties are full of entitled jackasses, and the Republican candidate pool are no exception to this, and the senior leadership class don't want one of their own being actually punished for doing something like this.
Therefore, there are entire categories of offenses against state procedure that are
never punished with criminal charges. Was Bush, or Obama, or any of their underlings, punished for torturing captives? No. Not even because it was legal, but because the reality is that we don't punish senior government officials for policy decisions. Maybe we should, but we don't, and there are some reasons we don't.
In the normal course of things, would Clinton be punished for mishandling classified information? No. Not because it was legal, but because the reality is that we don't punish senior government officials for the way they choose to run their departments. Maybe we should, but we don't, and there are some reasons we don't.
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The biggest reason we don't do that, in both cases, is that it invites politically motivated criminal charges against senior members of the government, as a way to purge the government of enemies, or to seek revenge against a defeated opponent. There are a lot of countries where everyone in the government is blatantly corrupt, and in those countries corruption charges are actually quite common- but they're used by the party in power to strike down members of a party that has been defeated. The party in power doesn't care about corruption as such, they just want an excuse to crush the opposition.
If we DO see charges pressed against Clinton, or against any senior leader of the Democratic Party, in the first years of a Trump administration, everyone with a brain should be perfectly aware that this is a politically motivated purge. An attempt to destroy political opposition to Trump's rule. Because if the Trump administration ever actually cared about criminal conduct by senior officials, the first thing they'd have to do is turn around and charge their own boss.
[I will make an exception to this if it turns out some senior Democrat is secretly a serial killer or something, AND if there is evidence of that which is clearly the product of neutral parties. But I do not think this to be likely.]
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*Very much 'his,' apparently...
