Posted: 18 August 2022 at 5:14pm | IP Logged | 5
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IMO, This is not quite as clear cut as the author of the article suggests
"Berger pleaded guilty to a violation of 18 U.S.C. §1924, the law against possessing government documents you shouldn’t have."
Berger cut a deal. Here are the facts he admitted to in the plea agreement:
- Using his security clearance, Berger accessed classified documents at the National Archive. - Berger concealed and removed 5 classified documents. - At his apartment, Berger destroyed 3 of the documents. - When contacted by the National Archive after they noticed the documents were missing, Berger lied about having removed them, and claimed he had merely "misfiled" them at the Archive.
Berger later returned the remaining two documents and admitted what he had done, but by that time he'd been caught.
These facts are enough to establish all of the elements of 18 USC 2071, and possibly Section 1519. He could easily have been charged with violating statutes other than Section 1924. All of these statutes share common elements.
"Hillary was never charged but the allegations against her also revolved around §1924."
That is absolutely correct, but again, based on the factual allegations against Hilary, a number of statutes could have been used as the basis of the investigation.
For example, all that is required to prove a violation of 18 USC 2071 is that the accused removed or destroyed a government record. That definition is easily broad enough to include any work related e-mail. The document doesn't even have to be classified.
The difference between Sections 1924 and 2071 is that 1924 addresses removal of documents, whereas 2071 addresses removal or destruction. However, since Clinton was accused of deleting electronic records, she could potentially have been charged with either.
Section 1519 contains one additional element- that the removal or destruction of a document was done with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence an investigation.
Here, investigators could have chosen to use that statute, because the accusation was that some e-mails were deleted that pertained to Benghazi, for the purpose of covering up information relevant to that investigation.
Let me pause here to clarify that I'm not suggesting Clinton was guilty of this. Thats a whole other topic. What we're comparing are accusations, and how they were investigated. As you pointed out, she was never charged. And so far, Trump has not been charged.
Among the statutes you referenced,18 USC 793 is the one that is potentially the most meaningfully different from 18 USC 1924, in that most of the provisions of that statute involve the transmission of classified information to a third party in a way that injures the United States, or gives an advantage to another country.
But some subsections don't go that far. For example, a person violates 18 USC 793(e) if he "willfully retains" any document which "could be used to the injury of the United States" regardless of whether the document was actually shared with any third party.
Since the Court has not revealed the supporting affidavit attached to the Trump search warrant, we don't know what Trump could be accused of with regard to Section 793, and we probably won't know for quite some time.
Similarly, its hard to say whether this was ever a potential charge with regard to Clinton, because we still don't know (and probably never will know) what was in the e-mails that were classified as Top Secret Special Access.
Edited by John Wickett on 18 August 2022 at 5:45pm
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