As the drama surrounding the Hilary Clinton e-mail scandal continues to evolve, FBI and other federal agencies have begun seeking financial retribution in the form of potential legal penalties against Hilary Clinton. While the nature and exact content of the emails shared or correspondences sent by Clinton is murky at best, federal agencies have shifted their efforts to hold her accountable for misleading testimony, attempting to destroy evidence, or otherwise directly interfering with the investigation. Arguably, this is defined in criminal terminology as an attempt to corrode, hide, or otherwise interfere with an active police investigation.
While there are many possibilities that classified or otherwise protected documents were shared by Clinton or inappropriately accessed, this is surprisingly not focus of this investigation in particular, or at least as a primary objective. The law, specifically U.S. Code 18, Section 1001, is the law in question in which is being applied in this instance. Essentially, a federal agency is looking to further investigate any probable inaccurate claims, false statements, or otherwise misleading and concealment of evidence, whether or not it was present, and if so, to what extent. The strong focus of U.S. Code 18, Section 1001 is providing ‘materially false’ data or statements (by definition) and information to federal agents. In assessing criminal culpability, at this point in time–according to unidentified sources–the FBI is making good-faith efforts to uncover and further pursue any other misleading statements, concealment or corruption of information on Clinton’s part and to hold her accountable for it to the fullest extent of U.S. law.
Interestingly enough, this same law was applied and utilized to prosecute and hold accountable perpetrators, witnesses, and other related individuals to cases such as that of the Anthrax case, as well as the 9/11 terrorist attacks and associated false testimonies given by numerously interviewed individuals. Due to the classification of this crime, it holds a value of up to five years in a federal prison for each violation if found and proven guilty in a court of law.
According to other testimonies and information circulated on the internet it is “possible” that Clinton intentionally masked or otherwise removed correspondences to disrupt or otherwise make it impossible for federal agents to track her correspondences, make sense of any sensitive information shared, and match it with her testimony(s). Because of this, the federal government, regardless of her reputation and previous to current authority, seeks to obtain financial retribution and hold her accountable should such violations have actually taken place during this entire case of claims, accusations, and situation regarding her email, personal, and professional accounts and correspondences and any statements made in them by her that could otherwise link her with any relevant criminal culpability. One might argue that in this special instance, U.S. Code 18, Section 1001 is put into place to recover lost funds and manpower utilizes in especially high-value cases and targets, or individuals of especially high interest in which otherwise render such cases helpless to the broad array of potential misinformation, loop holes, grey areas, and other common politics that would interfere with such a case.
Image credit: United States Department of State