Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey is the latest legal expert calling for Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton to face federal charges for handling sensitive government business over a private email server.
Mukasey, who served as AG under President George W. Bush, writes in an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal that Clinton’s email “explanations look increasingly contrived as evidence of malfeasance mounts day by day.”
According to Mukasey, there’s overwhelming evidence that Clinton was well aware her personal email setup was inadequate to handle sensitive documents — but she decided to use it anyway.
He writes:
The server also contained messages showing her contempt for classification procedures. This was bred at least in part by obvious familiarity with exactly “how it works” — such as when, an email shows, she directed a staff member simply to erase the heading on a classified document, converting it into “unpaper,” and send it on a “nonsecure” device.
Mukasey also notes that Clinton’s mishandling of classified documents certainly allowed sensitive information to fall into the wrong hands.
As Clinton’s email scandal deepened, the former secretary of state assumed what Mukasey terms “grandmotherly befuddlement” to deflect attention from her obvious attempts to cover up her wrongdoing.
“What, like with a cloth or something?” Clinton famously said when asked if she’d ordered her servers wiped.
She added: “I don’t know how it works digitally at all.”
That attempt to demonstrate ignorance about the very server she had her handlers set up is key to Mukasey’s argument that a criminal investigation is warranted.
He writes:
No criminality can be charged against Mrs. Clinton in connection with any of this absent proof that she had what the law regards as a guilty state of mind — a standard that may differ from one statute to another, depending on what criminal act is charged.
Yet — from her direction that classification rules be disregarded, to the presence on her personal email server of information at the highest level of classification, to her repeated falsehoods of a sort that juries are told every day may be treated as evidence of guilty knowledge — it is nearly impossible to draw any conclusion other than that she knew enough to support a conviction at the least for mishandling classified information.
According to the former AG, Clinton should at very least face the same scrutiny that disgraced Gen. David Petraeus did when he handed over sensitive material to his “biographer and mistress, who was herself an Army Reserve military intelligence officer cleared to see top secret information.”
Mukasey predicts that a proper criminal investigation would yield at least some charges for Clinton:
The simple proposition that everyone is equal before the law suggests that Mrs. Clinton’s state of mind — whether mere knowledge of what she was doing as to mishandling classified information; or gross negligence in the case of the mishandling of information relating to national defense; or bad intent as to actual or attempted destruction of email messages; or corrupt intent as to State Department business — justifies a criminal charge of one sort or another.
Read Mukasey’s full op-ed at The Wall Street Journal.
More on Clinton’s emails read:
“Hillary Clinton’s email defense collapsing following IG report”
“Here’s the standard Hillary Clinton employed to decide which ‘private’ emails to delete”
“Court spurns State Department, refuses to consolidate dozens of Hillary lawsuits into one big case”
“Hillary Clinton’s Nixonian nature”
“State Department ‘transparency czar’ was part of Hillary’s secret email chain”
“Read Clinton’s private State Department emails”
“FBI agents ‘busting ass’ to blow the top off Hillary Clinton’s email problem”
Or check out our full archive on Clinton corruption at “Hillary Files.”
The post Former AG says Clinton should face charges over email appeared first on Personal Liberty®.
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