* * *
Most crucially, the inspector general directly contradicts Clinton's repeated assertions that she complied both with federal law and State Department policies.
"At a minimum," the report finds, "Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with Department's policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act."
The report goes further, noting that
while Clinton's subsequent production of 55,000 pages of emails in response to State Department demands partially corrected these violations, the records Clinton turned over were incomplete. Remarkably, the report includes reference to a previously unreleased 2010 email in which Clinton, responding to her deputy chief of staff for operations, Huma Abedin, directly addresses her lack of an official State Department email account and voices a fear of the "risk of the personal being accessible" if she had one. I
n a briefing, State Department officials were unable to confirm the source of this email, but if it was omitted from the records Clinton produced, it again would raise questions about the process she used to distinguish between "federal records" and "personal records" before destroying the latter.
The inspector general also reveals the comments of State Department records management staff
in late 2010 expressly raising concerns that Clinton's private email server "could contain federal records that needed to be preserved in order to satisfy federal record-keeping requirements." A senior official rebuffed these concerns, claiming that Clinton's email arrangement "had been approved by the department legal staff" -- an assertion the inspector general concluded was untrue -- and directed staff "never to speak of the secretary's personal email system again."
Such facts undermine the argument that the significance of maintaining a private server and the negative effects it could have, including on responses to Freedom of Information Act requests or congressional subpoenas, were simply overlooked.
* * *
Yet the inspector general's report also highlights the uncertainty that surrounds the precise scope of the current FBI investigation. To the extent the FBI has limited its inquiry to security issues and the possible mishandling of classified information, for example, the inspector general's report finding violations of the federal records laws potentially implicates a different criminal statute.
Removing, concealing, or destroying federal records, regardless of whether they are classified, can constitute a federal felony. But again, courts have generally required prosecutors pursuing this charge to prove that defendants knew they were violating the law, for which the evidence against Clinton appears to be lacking.
* * *
Based on the publicly available evidence, the reality appears to be nuanced in a way that is satisfying to neither side.
Clinton violated the law, but committed no crime.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/26/opinions/clinton-email-server-ig-report-opinion-cox/
The problem is that we know that the FBI has dug deeper than the OIG. Hillary and her inner circle refused to cooperate with the OIG, but the FBI has access to the personnel and emails that the OIG could not get. The focus of the respective investigations is different as well.
The fact is, we don't know what threads the FBI has followed. Picking up from where the OIG left off, the FBI would want to know why the personal emails were destroyed, by whom and what was in them. What the FBI found in those self-selected emails deleted as "personal" could prove to be the make or break point.
