Under the law of the land, Hillary Clinton is disqualified from running for president

Under the law of the land, Hillary Clinton is disqualified from running for president

It’s very simple really. Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails from her private server after receiving a subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi ordering her to surender those emails. Although the Clinton campaign initially claimed the deletion of the emails occurred before she received the subpoena, the fact-checking site Politifact— no friend to conservatives — concedes that the congressional subpoena came on March 4, 2015, and the emails were deleted sometime after March 25 of the same year.

Under the U.S. Code, Title 18, Part I, Chapter 101, § 2071:

(a) Whoever willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, or destroys, or attempts to do so, or, with intent to do so takes and carries away any record, proceeding, map, book, paper, document, or other thing, filed or deposited with any clerk or officer of any court of the United States, or in any public office, or with any judicial or public officer of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

(b) Whoever, having the custody of any such record, proceeding, map, book, document, paper, or other thing, willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both; and shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States. As used in this subsection, the term “office” does not include the office held by any person as a retired officer of the Armed Forces of the United States. [Emphasis added]

If the Democratic nominee has any wiggle room at all it is in the half-baked stipulation, also contained in the Politifact piece that “the FBI found no evidence that the emails were deleted deliberately to avoid the subpoena or other requests. Clinton’s team requested for the emails to be deleted months before the subpoena came.”

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

Two questions that need to be asked: (1) What reason would Clinton’s team have for requesting that the emails be deleted in the first place unless it was because she had something to hid? (2) Why would anyone seeking to circumvent the law leave “evidence” for law enforcement to find that plainly states the intention?

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles

Ben Bowles is a freelance writer and regular contributor to "Liberty Unyielding."

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