The left side of the swamp is deep.

Mueller deputy praised DOJ official after she defied Trump travel ban order: 'I am so proud'

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017...-so-proud.html

Investigators don't tend to have a positive opinion about the criminals they are investigating, especially as they will know a lot of the wrongdoings of those people that aren't yet public. So this seems unsurprising.

Though we're only at 4 indictments so far, so if Trump wants to be as great at criminality as some of the previous Republican administrations, there's still a fair way to go...

He was first ostensibly investigating Hillary, who lied to the FBI, yet somehow wasn't prosecuted for it. Instead of investigating her, he fudged Comey's language so he could get her off the hook. This would be the double standard I'm pointing out here.

Seems like a totally unsubstantiated claim.

What got her off the hook was not the change to the language you cite in your OP, it was the fact that Comey's team decided that intent was necessary to break the statute. They decided that in order to be guilty she had to have intended to leak classified information, rather than merely being extremely careless/grossly negligent. I do not personally agree with Comey and his team's decision on that. For one, they could have come out on day 1 and said "look our interpretation of the statute is that intention to leak the information is required, and nobody is alleging that Hillary Clinton was intentionally trying to leak information, they are instead alleging that she's trying to hide information from Freedom of Information Act requests by using a private server, so she's clearly not guilty of having intent to leak, so there's nothing to investigate."

I, personally, think they should have pinged her on intent to hide her emails in an effort to avoid her FOIA obligations to release them all. In the end they seem to have decided that disciplinary action for such FOIA breaches were an internal department thing and thus that the state department itself would have sanctioned her if she still worked there, and that FOIA was none of the FBI's business/not what they were investigating, which I personally think was a poor decision. I suspect a bit of political calculus came in here because James Comey didn't want the the FBI to seem unduly political and so didn't want to prosecute Hillary for a minor charge like FOIA avoidance just before an election, since he believed that would throw the election to Trump, whom it seems like he might have been also investigating at the time and expecting to later prosecute on various money laundering and fraud and electoral charges (I guess we shall see over the next couple of years what comes of that).

The FBI is not just "investigators". They hold themselves up as a paragon of virtue with no axe to grind....

And you show your extreme bias by calling them "criminals" before they're even convicted. (Even an indictment is not a conviction)

Except that "interpretation" is flat out wrong. Intent is expressly NOT required to fall afoul of the statute.

As I've pointed out before, every person who has ever been found "not guilty" in a US court was indicted at some point.

My crim professor showed us the clip with Comey talking about the intent in class and she was making all sorts of horrified faces and gestures like, "Whaaaaaaaaat?!! Is he saying that?!"

**I am not participating in this back and forth. I just thought my crim prof's reaction was hilarious.**

Source: Breitbart

The Daily Caller reports that Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin were interviewed by Strzok and said they were not aware of Clinton’s use of a private email server until after Clinton left the State Department.

“Mills did not learn Clinton was using a private server until after Clinton’s [Department of State] tenure,” notes from Mills’ April 9, 2016 interview say, according to the Caller. “Mills stated she was not even sure she knew what a server was at the time.”

Abedin also denied knowing about the server until 2013, but those denials were contradicted by email exchanges in which both aides discuss the Clinton server. In a 2010 email, Mills asks Abedin and another aide if the “server [is] ok?” after Clinton’s emails apparently went down. They were also included in an August 2011 email wherein a State Department official told them that Clinton’s “email server is down.”

But while former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn was charged last week with making false statements to the FBI — an interview also reportedly conducted by Strzok — no such consequences were handed to the Clinton aides. As the Caller notes, former FBI Director James Comey even defended their false statements in September 2016 at a congressional hearing.

http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...-peter-strzok/

© Copyright Original Source

Intent is certainly not mentioned in the statute itself. However, it's totally possible other laws influence the interpretation of that law by courts and that case law in the US has evolved over the decades in such a way that courts have ruled that intent is indeed required. That would not surprise me in the least. Comey's statement was essentially that the case law was such that the knowledgeable prosecutors he'd consulted with had said it wasn't reasonable to prosecute. It seems entirely possible that that is true.

I totally agree with you OBP that it is not what the statute says, read in isolation and when I first heard Comey give his speech I thought "huh???" because I'd read the statute and knew it didn't mention intent. However bits of statutes read in isolation is not how the law works, and not how case law works - other laws influence the interpretation of statutes and the decisions of many judges over many decades affect the degree to which things like intent are viewed as relevant.

Now it's possible Comey was simply lying for political expediency, and had decided to make up the need for 'intent' as a plausible defense for Hillary. However Comey for most of his life has been staunchly Republican, and more recently in the FBI has done his best to be nonpartisan, so it seems rather doubtful that he would risk his career in order to be pro-Hillary, and given he gave a scathing speech against her it doesn't seem to me like he was pro-Hillary. And, frankly, if Comey had been factually wrong about intent being required, I would have expected literally dozens of experts to appear on TV within the week saying "Comey is factually wrong on this", which didn't happen. It is interesting that thewriteranon's professor thought Comey was wrong, but as far as I can tell, that opinion doesn't appear to be widely shared among experts.

So as much as I hated Hillary, and would have loved to see her jailed, and as much as I hate corrupt politicians across the board and would love to see every single corrupt Democrat, corrupt Republican, the entire corrupt Trump administration jailed, and as much as I think Hillary did intentionally try to hide emails from FOIA release... it does not appear like that is actually a prosecutable crime in practice in the US currently. And on the other side of the aisle, Republicans appear to do their best to evade FOIA as well, with numerous Trump officials using private email including Mike Pence using it to hide emails when he was governor of Indiana.

I think what we've seen from the Clintons in general in their careers is that they have good enough lawyers advising them of exactly where the line of illegality is, and as they are contemplating doing their near-criminal behavior they are very careful to stay just inside the line of legality with their competent lawyers carefully guiding their steps. Whereas what we've seen from Trump makes me think he's way over the line of illegality and has been for decades and that the lawyers he employs are incompetent buffoons who couldn't defend a saint successfully. Whether the US political setup will allow Mueller to remove Trump for illegality is another matter entirely (e.g. Trump may fire Mueller, Trump may pardon himself and his family, the Republican congress may simply refuse to impeach Trump no matter what comes out, Mueller may view it as destabilizing for the country to try and indict the President so might simply indict everyone around Trump instead etc).

fwiw, if there is no intent in a statute, courts have 3 options:

1. Strict liability, no intent required - typical for regulatory crimes (like gun regulation, that sort of thing)
2. Read intent into the statute - for the Model Penal Code, this means subjective recklessness, which is a much, much lower level of intent than what Comey was apparently reading (he read a purpose+ intent, which is an uber-high, uber-rare level of intent*); the Model Penal Code isn't law, but most states adopt it to some degree.
3. Read no intent and strike it down as unconstitutional


*See Cheek v. United States - Cheek was let off on tax evasion because the court decided to use this almost unknown level of intent; their reasoning was basically that they wanted to avoid severely penalizing people who make honest mistakes in filing their taxes, because tax law is hopelessly complicated

Based on everything we know about this case, it's clear that Comey was looking for any reason at all to not indict Hillary even though people have been convicted for less.

Hillary probably made him an offer he couldn't refuse.