You may have seen a
Washington Post article by Paul Waldman claiming Hillary Clinton would be "exonerated" of charges of keeping classified material on the closet email server. His argument:
In order to have broken the law, it isn’t enough for Clinton to have had classified information in a place where it was possible for it to be hacked. She would have had to intentionally given classified information to someone without authorization to have it.
I'd been feeling this was a weak argument, a misreading of the law, when I spotted the
following at
Power Line by regular contributor Scott Johnson, an attorney. He counters:
Waldman to the contrary notwithstanding, the statute does not require that Clinton have “intentionally given classified information to someone without authorization to have it[.]” It doesn’t even require that the information be classified. It merely requires that the information “relate to the national defense.”
Andrew McCarthy is a former Assistant United States Attorney who handled serious cases involving national security. Unlike Waldman, he knows what he is talking about. Andy summarized potentially applicable law for the New York Times in part as follows
The laws against mishandling classified information are prosecution-friendly. For example, it is a felony for one entrusted with classified information not only to communicate it to a person unauthorized to have it, but also to enable its removal from its secure storage facility through gross negligence. It is also a crime to fail to report that information’s improper removal or communication. So is retaining materials containing classified information at an unauthorized location.
