Why Hillary Not Likely to Be Indicted in E-Mail Flap

While the Republican establishment remains distraught and plotting over how to sabotage Donald Trump's possible nomination win, they remain near orgasmic over dreams that Hillary Clinton will be indicted over her use of a private e-mail server while Secretary of State - something we have since learned her predecessors did as well - thus throwing the Democrat side of the election process into chaos.  A column in the Washington Post looks at why this Republican wet dream is unlikely to happen.  Here are excerpts:

For those of you salivating — or trembling — at the thought of Hillary Clinton being clapped in handcuffs as she prepares to deliver her acceptance speech at the Democratic convention this summer: deep, cleansing breath. Based on the available facts and the relevant precedents, criminal prosecution of Clinton for mishandling classified information in her emails is extraordinarily unlikely.

My exasperation with Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state is long-standing and unabated. Lucky for her, political idiocy is not criminal.

There are plenty of unattractive facts but not a lot of clear evidence of criminality, and we tend to forget the distinction,” American University law professor Stephen Vladeck, an expert on prosecutions involving classified information, told me. “This is really just a political firestorm, not a criminal case.”

Could a clever law student fit the fact pattern into a criminal violation? Sure. Would a responsible federal prosecutor pursue it? Hardly — absent new evidence, based on my conversations with experts in such prosecutions.

There are two main statutory hooks. Title 18, Section 1924, a misdemeanor, makes it a crime for a government employee to “knowingly remove” classified information “without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location.” Prosecutors used this provision in securing a guilty plea from former CIA director David H. Petraeus, who was sentenced to probation and fined $100,000. But there are key differences between Petraeus and Clinton.

Petraeus clearly knew the material he provided to Paula Broadwell was classified and that she was not authorized to view it. “Highly classified . . . code word stuff in there,” he told her. He lied to FBI agents, the kind of behavior that tends to inflame prosecutors.

In Clinton’s case, by contrast, there is no clear evidence that Clinton knew (or even should have known) that the material in her emails was classified. Second, it is debatable whether her use of the private server constituted removal or retention of material.

Another possible prosecutorial avenue involves the Espionage Act. Section 793(d) makes it a felony if a person entrusted with “information relating to the national defense” “willfully communicates, delivers [or] transmits” it to an unauthorized person. That might be a stretch given the “willfully” requirement.

Section 793(f) covers a person with access to “national defense” information who through “gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust.” 

The argument here would be that Clinton engaged in such “gross negligence” by transferring information she knew or should have known was classified from its “proper place” onto her private server, or by sharing it with someone not authorized to receive it. Yet, as the Supreme Court has said, “gross negligence” is a “nebulous” term. Especially in the criminal context, it would seem to require conduct more like throwing classified materials into a Dumpster than putting them on a private server that presumably had security protections.

My point here isn’t to praise Clinton’s conduct. She shouldn’t have been using the private server for official business in the first place. It’s certainly possible she was cavalier about discussing classified material on it; that would be disturbing but she wouldn’t be alone, especially given rampant over-classification.

The handling of the emails is an entirely legitimate subject for FBI investigation. That’s a far cry from an indictable offense.

Donald Trump - and GOP - Supporters Are Living in a Fantasy Land

I increasingly look at today's GOP and shake my head thinking WTF happened to a party that once embraced knowledge, intellect and rational thought.  But then I remember that the unwashed masses of Christofascists who have hijacked the party base and then suddenly the swamp fever that has gripped the GOP all make sense.  After all, these are the same folks who trust in the writings of unknown, ignorant Bronze Age herders to guide their lives and formulate their world view.  No wonder those supporting Donald Trump - and other GOP candidates - appear to be living in a fantasy land.  They ARE living in a fantasy land with little likelihood of coming to their senses anytime soon.  A piece in Salon looks at the fantasy world of these people and why Donald Trump is their pied piper.  Here are excerpts:

Even though I’m not a politician, I guess I committed a textbook Kinsley gaffe on “Hardball” yesterday, when I inadvertently told the truth about what I think of the 12 New Hampshire Republican voters Bloomberg assembled to explain the Donald Trump phenomenon. (You can watch, below.) I said they made me “sad,” and I made a comment about “the lowest common denominator” (more on what I meant in a minute) – and then my friend Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, had a lot of fun calling me an “elitist” and insisting people like me are why voters like that support Trump. Or something.

“They’re not thinking. They want to be entertained,” I asserted.

That’s a big mistake in mainstream journalism, where the Very Serious People insist we must respect what Trump’s voters represent.  I failed to keep up the Beltway fiction that we must take these voters seriously because they’re “frustrated” with Washington, and thus their irrational anger and weakness for slogans over solutions is a symptom of a grave political malady in The Age of Obama.

But actually listening to those voters, it’s hard to take much they said seriously. Their Trump praise frequently reflects their Obama disdain. . . and their support of Trump’s “solutions” makes no sense.

There’s a childlike wishful thinking in these voters’ belief that Trump can solve all the country’s problems by being “tough.” And that’s what I meant with my reference to the “lowest common denominator” – I actually wasn’t referring to the voters themselves (in fact, that makes no sense); I was talking about the solutions they seem to embrace for the country’s woes. Pining for a “tough” guy who’s done well in “business” but is “one of us” is simplistic and a little scary. Most of that New Hampshire focus group seemed to want a daddy, not a president.

Steele put his finger on a dilemma – for his party. When people hear criticism of Trump’s voters, he explained, “whether it’s from the media or Republicans in the party, they go, ‘This guy,’ as the woman said, ‘he’s speaking to me. I may not agree with everything he’s saying, but he’s one of us. He’s a billionaire, but he’s one of us.’” That’s a genuine problem for Republican elites who disdain Trump but don’t want to see him mount a third party run if he doesn’t get the nomination. 

[S]omething less than 10 percent of eligible American voters currently say they support Donald Trump. That isn’t a mandate; that’s the same old angry, noisy, delusional minority of voters that persistently afflicts American politics. I’m not going to apologize for telling the truth: their support of Trump makes me sad, because their reasoning shows little or no grasp of what it takes to make political change in this country.

The Fantasy World of the Southern Republicans

Here in Virginia the state's demographics are changing rapidly with urban populations growing as the number of rural voters shrinks, and the numbers of non-white voters is soaring, especially in vote rich Northern Virginia.  No Republican has won statewide office since 2009 and the Virginia GOP currently maintains control of the Virginia General Assembly thanks to shockingly gerrymandered districts.  Yet despite these changes, the Virginia GOP hasn't changed its play book and, if anything has double down on its racism and self-prostitution to "Christian" religious extremists.  Virginia is ahead of the curve compared to other Southern states, but the same trend is happening elsewhere even as the GOP remains in a fantasy world believing that yesterday, today and tomorrow will all remain the same.  A piece in the New York Times looks at how sooner or later - and it is hopefully sooner - the GOP fantasy world will slam into objective reality.  Here are highlights:

Such public-relations acumen is a relatively new thing in Alabama, whose residents complain constantly about being looked down on. But the more intriguing story is that Mr. Bentley is among the Southern Republican officeholders who, despite the smart occasional concession, do not fully understand that their dominance will not be a feature of the region’s two-party future. They still act as if tomorrow will be exactly like today, their tenure assured by unbendable evangelical Christians and testy white suburbanites.

But, as in the time of Henry W. Grady, the post-Reconstruction journalist who popularized the term “the New South,” inexorable forces will in a few decades reshape Southern society, this time in a more progressive direction. Witness the flood of gay weddings in Mobile and the mounting alarm of evangelicals across the region, the latter being the driving force behind the former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s retro presidential campaign. Like their peers in other regions, secular Southern whites under 40 care less than their elders do about cultural issues like flags, racial and ethnic purity, or private sexual conduct.

This won’t come about because current Republican voters and their elected officials now in office will somehow be converted, but because they will be overwhelmed by new voters in the burgeoning Hispanic and Asian communities, who will join the black minority.

It seems an overstatement to say that Southern Republicans are in outright denial about the fact that whites will be a minority in America around 2043. It does seem fair to say that the national Republican Party is underreacting, and Southern Republicans seem to be especially resistant to appealing to their minority neighbors.

Like their counterparts in the national G.O.P. and the current crop of about 15 me-too Republican presidential candidates, Southern legislators seem unwilling to make any change on social welfare, retirement, health care or women’s and gay rights that would attract Southerners not voting Republican at present.

A survey of demographic and polling data in what the Brookings Institution demographer William H. Frey calls a New Sunbelt, stretching across the Southern Rim from Miami to Los Angeles, makes an ironclad case for this huge recalibration in political and cultural attitudes. 

“Demography is destiny” is the theme of Mr. Frey’s new book, “Diversity Explosion: How New Racial Demographics Are Remaking America,” and another recent book, “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown,” by Paul Taylor and his colleagues at the Pew Research Center.

“Demographic transformations are dramas in slow motion,” Mr. Taylor writes, an implicit warning to Republicans who believe that all they need to do is reinforce the beliefs and prejudices of the suburban South.

For now, Republican officeholders live in a dream world where they think rhetoric and repetition will somehow cause minority voters and center-left whites to turn into Republican voters. Alarmed Republican political professionals warn that unless their candidates stop obstructing on health care and make progress on gender issues, the party will lose the White House in 2016 and in quadrennial spurts see its Southern hegemony dismantled by new voters in the New Sunbelt.

Now we’re seeing a new coalition politics, in which Hispanic, black and Asian voters are joined by Democratic-leaning younger whites who, unlike older white voters, do not care about dog-whistle issues.   It is a quintessential Southern pattern. The region’s most affluent citizens always resist the obvious at first.  

It will take awhile for Southern and national Republicans to understand that, as Mr. Frey put it, “Demographics is destiny.” The longer they take to get it, the greater the odds that multiethnic Democrats will finally break the Republican lock on the solidly red South.