Email Jail? Get Real

A lawyer friend is fond of telling anyone who will listen (and I'm usually not one of them) that Hillary Clinton will be going to jail for her use of private email as Secretary of State.  He also insists that Obama will stage a military coup in January and refuse to leave the White House -- but I digress.

He recently sent a cute Bill & Hil meme to the lovely Mrs. Gammons, along with a portion of the U.S. criminal code -- to be precise, Title 18, Chapter 37, Section 793 -- which he indicated was for me!  Wow!  What a lovely gift.  As I've said to other lawyers at other times, "Thank you for the unsolicited recitation of code/case law/whatever."

This section of code deals with espionage and protecting defense information, and is based on war and defense legislation from WW's I and II.  (It speaks of things like canals, telegraphs, photographic negatives and blueprints.)  The learned counselor reads Section 793 to mean, without a doubt, that Hilz is gonna do hard time in the Big House for sure.  Because . . . Email-ghazi!  He's joined in his opinion by the likes of Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Tom Delay, Dick Morris and other crackpot conspiracy-theorists.

Is it his contention that Hillary Clinton used a private email server for nefarious purposes, to intentionally harm and endanger and weaken the security of the United States?  No?  Then STFU.

After countless hours of Congressional show-trial grilling by Darrell Issa and Trey Gowdy, and, of course, after getting off scot-free for personally assassinating Vince Foster while simultaneously hiding her Whitewater tax losses and planning the Benghazi attack -- after all that, there remains a sub-set of "special" people who are still convinced Hilz is going to email jail.  

(Before that happens, maybe Gowdy can drag her back in for another smear hearing and make her look really good again.)

Let's get real.  Mrs. Clinton's use of private email was ill-considered, not proof of some horrible character flaw which will surely doom our Great Nation.  Not only is she far from the only public official to use private email, she's not even the first Secretary of State to do so.  Colin Powell and Condi Rice did it, too.

Whether it's government email servers or the NSA hack or Apple iPhone encryption, data security is an important issue.  Like our technology itself, our thinking and legal interpretations on the subject are constantly evolving.

In this environment, in these times, do you seriously believe that Hillary Clinton will be charged, prosecuted, convicted and sentenced for using private email?  Guess again, bud.

By the way, in case I'm wrong, would she do time as the sitting President, or only after leaving office in 2024?