(Thomas Mitchell) – So, Hillary Clinton has wiped clean her email server that she used while serving as secretary of state.
“We learned today, from her attorney, Secretary Clinton unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server,” said House Select Committee on Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy on Friday.
Will the Justice Department take any notice of this? Ronald Rotunda, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, explained recently in The Wall Street Journal why it should:
The law says that no one has to use email, but it is a crime (18 U.S.C. section 1519) to destroy even one message to prevent it from being subpoenaed. Prosecutors charging someone with obstruction don’t even have to establish that any investigation was pending or under way when the deletion took place. As T. Markus Funk explained in a journal article for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the prosecutor “need only prove that the defendant shredded the documents, at least in part, to make life more difficult for futureinvestigators, if and when they eventually appear.”
To read the entire column, click here.
Mr. Mitchell publishes the 4TH ST8 Blog at www.4thst8.wordpress.com.