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Andrew Anglin
Daily Stormer
August 19, 2016
tfw it’s news to you you’re not allowed to steal classified documents and store them on a private server.
The way our legal system works is that court rulings are based on previous court rulings. Known as “precedent,” the concept ensures that justice is dealt equally to all people in the society.
The decision of James Comey to refuse to recommend the prosecution of Hillary Clinton because she claimed not to know she had broken a law has created a very sticky situation for courts moving forward, as now anyone can potentially cite the Clinton case and claim ignorance of the law as a defense.
The courts will have to accept this, as the precedent has been set.
Writing for The Hill, former prosecutor Ron Sievert, currently a Professor at the Bush School of Government and Adjunct Professor at the University of Texas School of Law, explains the situation further:
As I read the recent comments of FBI Director James Comey regarding his recommendation not to pursue criminal charges against Hillary Clinton over the use of a private email server, I naturally wondered why an investigator was making final judgments on the interpretation of the law when that function has always been assigned first to the Department of Justice and U.S. Attorney.
In doing so, he ignored one statute (18 USC 793 (f) related to gross negligence — see the recent The Hill article on the execution of an Iranian spy) — apparently disregarded the knowing destruction of government documents, and then, perhaps of equal legal concern, he added the wrong mental state to the statute prohibiting knowing removal of classified documents with intent to retain them at an unauthorized location. (18 USC 1924).
Specifically he required that the government prove “willfulness” or knowing violation of a specific law under 1924 before he would proceed against the improper removal of thousands of classified documents to her private Blackberry and server.
Ignorance of the language of the actual statutes was thus a defense. In his congressional hearing he seemed to attribute this to DOJ. Although I have no doubt that some in DOJ, given the Department’s reputation for caution, might have gone overboard and asked for this mental state, it is not the law and was never applied that way in my 25 years as a federal prosecutor with the exception of tax, export and currency prosecutions.
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals 2016 pattern Jury Charge states that the use of the word “willfulness” in indictments when not required by the actual statute or case law “should be discouraged.” 18 USC 1924 and associated case law, as with most federal statutes, does not require willfulness. That is, ignorance of the law, as most people know, is not a defense.
It is now.
It is enough that you acted with knowledge and intent. Of course it certainly helps with the jury if the defendant knew they were doing something wrong.
But as Mrs. Clinton had been briefed on procedures for handling classified documents and government records and ignored those briefings, and as she repeatedly lied publicly to cover her actions, there was plenty of evidence to convince a jury that she knew she was acting improperly. That would be enough for most “reasonable prosecutors.”
Why is this important? Well the next time someone makes a false statement to a bank, or someone they are soliciting by mail, or by email, or a gun dealer saws off a gun barrel or converts a single fire to an automatic, uses a weapon in technical violation of myriad laws and regulations, inappropriately effects interstate commerce in countless ways or commits anyone of a host of other major white collar federal crimes, remember that the logical defense will now be, “Even if I suspected it was probably wrong, I did not know I was violating a specific federal law.“
“As was the case with Hillary, because you cannot establish that I ‘willfully’ violated a known federal law, you cannot proceed.” Proving this mental state would obviously be almost an impossible burden in many cases.
The author writes as one who battled and won in the courts against wealthy bank, wire and mail fraud defendants in the 1980s and 1990s who tried unsuccessfully to raise as a legal defense that in committing their wrongful acts they did not know they were violating a specific federal law.
Director Comey has revitalized that old argument and probably created a new one. By doing so has placed a new burden on federal prosecutors. Defense attorneys will now not just privately bemoan the fact that their client did not have Clinton privileges, but publicly argue that their client had never read and understood the statute under which they have been charged by the government.
He goes on to say that people may well start winning these cases in federal court.
Of course, this precedent only applies to federal criminal law, so it isn’t something you can use for not reading a parking sign, and thus won’t completely collapse the entire legal system. But there is no clear explanation for how federal courts are going to deal with this precedent going forward.
Following the Nuremberg Trials, many legal scholars were concerned that these highly politicized trials, wherein people were executed based on eyewitness testimony, as well as for doing things which were not illegal when they did them (“ex post facto law“), would lead to a collapse of the global legal system.
In April of 1946, The Atlantic published an article entitled “Nuremberg: A Fair Trial? A Dangerous Precedent,” wherein the author, Charles E. Wyzanski, wrote: “If in the end there is a generally accepted view that Nuremberg was an example of high politics masquerading as law, then the trial instead of promoting may retard the coming of the day of world law.”
However, because this was a special type of international court, no country was obliged to uphold the precedent set there, and international criminal law is pretty much a disaster anyway.
However, The Clinton Defense is now very real, and it is going to completely transform the way the legal system in this country works in such a way that will be very good for the type of high-level criminals who violate federal law.
