ajax18 wrote:
Who exactly makes up this law? Is it a congressional statute? Is it case law precedent? Or is it what the current attorney general says is the law?
I think you misunderstood what occurred here. Clinton didn't delete emails in response to a supeona or anything like that. She had ordered her work-related emails to be released. The rest were deleted in standard practice that I imagine is similar to what occurs at your workplace. Determining what was "work-related" was done by her legal team. This is not against the law. It's just not. if you feel it should be, that's another matter, but you can't jail her for breaking a law that does not exist.
This is not like when the Bush admin "lost" many more emails under supeona, which is often how it is covered in the right-wing media (ironically enough). She complied with all subsequent Congressional supeonas and orders on email preservation. This is part of why calls to prosecute and jail her for this are baseless and frightening. It's calling on prosecuting and jailing political opposition without a lawful predicate. This is what happens in autocracies.
The legally questionable thing Clinton did was have a private server for government business in the first place. That's it. It was a practice she inherited from and expanded upon from the previous administration. The argument in favor of not indicting her for that is the relevant law has never been used to successfully prosecute anything close to what she did, which is very much an edge case. I personally was in favor of indicting her with the expectation she would be cleared, but it is perfectly reasonable to opt not to indict given how unlikely a successful prosecution would have been. Even if she would've been convicted, the penalty would not have involved any jail time. We're talking about a hard to prosecute, minor offense. All the subsequent stuff focused around deleting emails in a desperate run from the law is fever swamp nonsense that misunderstands and/or misrepresents what happened and what the law is.
Could Congress have wiretapped his phone similar to the way Obama wiretapped the Trump campaign?
There's no evidence that happened. You need to stop consuming trash.
To hide it in an email conversation he would have needed a private server. Isn't that reason Hillary used an illegal private server, to hide her emails from congressional Republicans?
Well, this is just confusing. Yes, it's quite possible Clinton used a private email server to frustrate FOIA requests. No, you don't need a private server to send secure messages. There are encrypted applications that do that. The Trump admin has had numerous figures caught over and over doing that, incidentally, which doesn't seem to have bothered you despite all your concern for executive communication retention practices in the case of Clinton. Moreoever, Bill Clinton is a wealthy private citizen. If that actually was needed, he could've done that. But even if he made a phone call, that sure as hell is more secure than just having a meeting in public. The underlying conspiracy idea makes no sense.