Before I begin reading any article about politics I look to the author information. Who are they and what is their bias. Here is me and mine:
I was born and raised in NYC. My mother was a probation officer for Kings County and then Queens. Her compassion was my compass. I started working on Wall Street at a young age. Between then and now is 30 years. I am a registered Democrat but that is just an expensive logo on my shirt. If others choose another brand it does not upset me and I hope that we may have enjoyable and informed conversations. I have a good view of the visible part of the political iceberg and the largest part beneath the surface. I voted for both Bill and Hillary Clinton and Obama twice. Many of my friends have run for office, some have lost, some have won.
I am writing this post for me and sharing it with you. There was no source I could find that gave me a good understanding of ’emailgate’.  After presenting the absolute facts I do share my admittedly worthless opinion
I have recently updated this to include President Obama’s Fix interview and I have broken that into its components. In the end I leave it to the reader can draw their own conclusion. If you don’t know the specifics of her problems this is only a sparse outline:
The discovery of the Hillary Clinton private server email server began after Guciffer a Romanian hacker broke into the email account of Sidney Blumenthal a trusted Hillary advisor and employee of Clinton Global Initiative.
That email was top-secret NSA intercepts (roughly it is when we install a splitter in a fiber optic cable that is being used by another countries intelligence service. This is one of the most crucial secrets with government) and sent them to Clinton using his gmail. It is not yet known how Blumenthal obtained this information.
Prior to her confirmation As Secretary of State, Obama required that Hillary and Bill adhere to strict protocols that establish a chinese wall between Clinton Global and the State Department. This forbade solicitations, required reporting of donors, acceptance of donations for foreign countries and obtaining approval for all Bill Clinton speaking engagements. Neither Hillary or Bill complied. This is the subject of current investigations (separate from the email server investigation)
Since leaving The White House in 2001, the Bill and Hillary Clinton household has amassed a personal fortune (outside of The Clinton Foundation) of over $105 Million mainly from speaking fees paid to Bill Clinton from many nations, organizations, leaders, and business interests hostile to the United States and U.S. foreign policy and especially hostile to Israel.
No other Sec of state exclusively used their own email server. Other Secs of State have occasionally used their personal emails but those emails were archived with the State Dept to comply with FOIA requirements.
Hillary never was never given a .gov email address.
During Hillary Clinton’s entire term as Secretary of State the State had no Inspector General or compliance officer responsible to oversee State’s compliance with laws, regulations, and Departmental procedures.
Hillary brought her 2008 campaign techie into the state IT department. Possibly with the assistance of Brook Colangelo, the CIO for the Executive Office of the White House, Hillary’s IT person created an off the books system that allowed her to divert state department mail to her unencrypted private server and accessed by her unencrypted blackberry and Ipad. This staffer, Brian Pagliano has been granted prosecutorial immunity. The IT guy also set up other Hillary staffers with blackberrys that accessed the Clinton email server. One employee, Cheryl Mills even lost her blackberry with top-secret emails and it has never been recovered
The State department ‘secret’ systems are JWICS & SIPRNet and any unclassified systems do not connect to each other. The only way to get information from one system to another is to ‘Sneaker’, an IT slang for someone taking information on one system, saving it to portable media, disk or thumb drive and walking it over to the other system and uploading it, thereby bypassing the procedural safeguards inherent in separate, unconnected systems. An alternative, using the same concept, would be to print the data from a JWICS terminal (possibly inside the State Department) and then scan the hard copy into an unclassified system.
Hillary staffers and advisors without top-secret security clearancee and at least two working at Clinton Global had email accounts at her private email server
Emails the FOIA have discovered show that Hillary asked Jake Sullivan, one of her top advisors to ‘remove the headers of a secret Talking Points and “send as paper”
Hillary’s confidants deliberately removed USG classification markers from the State Department’s secure email system, they engaged in criminal violations of the U.S. Code, including forgery by deletion of legally required classification labels.
The transfer of State Department emails include 22 that are so secret, called SAP, that they can only be viewed in Mahogany Row, a secure wood-paneled environment that not electronic devices are even permitted in. That information is about human intelligence.
Hillary was repeatedly warned and acknowledged the caution of signal intelligence (advanced hacking techniques) used by China and Russia hackers and continued to use her unsecure blackberry in those countries.
Hillary’s response is claiming that the determination of ‘secret’ was made retroactively. Email classifications in the State are dynamic. Thousands of emails were ‘born’ secret, meaning the sender clicked the pop up radio button that is used to identify the classification automatically happens when sending an email.
FOIA requests for Hillary’s emails were stonewalled by Cheryl Mills and her official response (when there was one) was that they had no archive of her emails.
Hillary Clinton destroyed more than 30,000 emails once the subpoenas started coming in. Hillary’s argument is that she only destroyed personal records.
Hillary claims that the emails are her personal property, therefore she had the right to select which ones were business and which were private. She deleted the ones she singularly determined were personal. Legal scholars have insisted otherwise and that her homebrew email server is her work email, all the emails on it belong to the state department archives. Therefore any deletions had to be agreed officially by a process and not her judgement.
When Hillary Clinton departed State, she was required to undergo separation procedures in accordance with State’s Records Management Manual: “Records Organization.” is mandatory departmental procedure requiring Hillary to certify that she had returned to State all documents in her possession and Form 109 that she must return official records to State and also warned Hillary Clinton of multiple criminal statutes that would be violated if she did not. If Hillary did not sign Form 109, she deliberately defied the law requiring her to do so.
FBI agents have likely retrieved all her emails in their digital form and also her deleted emails, this also gives them the metadata and the time-stamps.
Breaking down Obama’s discussion of Hillary and ’emailgate’ from a Fox tv interview. Obama said:
“…a carelessness” in managing her emails: This is chick full of legal defense from statutes that may apply. Carelessness infers no intention. Her emails is a adwfense that she was permitted to delete emails because they belong to’her’.
“There’s classified, and then there’s classified.” This is meaningless to anybody who understands classifications and it was meant for general consumption to soften the allegations against Hillary.
“She would never intentionally put America in any kind of jeopardy.” Here he reiterates a possible defense to deter Department of Justice moving forward with a case. This infers her legal defense in response to certain statutes that require the prosecution to prove intent.
“…that there’s a carelessness in terms of managing e-mails that she has owned.” Another precise legal term that insists that the emails were ‘hers’ to delete.
If the FBI investigation suggests a grand jury they would refer the case to Loretta Lynch, the Director of the Department of Justice and an Obama appointee.
The FBI discretion with the course of the investigations. They could go mile wide, mile deep but that has peril risking a lower probability of conviction.
The investigation of Hillary Clinton and her entourage takes time. All I’s must be dotted, T’s crossed. I think the FBI will request, and obtain, at least one more immunity in advance of the referral and that will possibly go to Huma, her longtime confident and advisor.
My opinion begins…
Politics is a consumer item and Hillary #ImWithHer has been manufactured, packaged and put on the shelves at eye level.
It is difficult to speculate about the precise charges, however directionally It is narrower to go after her within the scope of the Espionage Act.
Takes her security clearance away and is non negotiable
Avoids problems and drawn out trials that other charges might bring such as questions of ‘who had control of the server’, ‘intent’, ‘benefit’ of corruption,  concealing and destruction of government property, the dangers of pressing a racketeering conspiracy and the light burdens of anticipatory obstruction of justice
Reserves the opportunity to use more flexible charges later as the Clinton Inc investigations continue
Gives more freedom for investigators to find a cooperating witness to help navigate the forensics of the Clinton Inc.
I expect the FBI to refer a case and for the Department of Justice to either appoint a special counselor and let Hillary’s campaign continue or to simply decline to prosecute for political reasons.
I expect Hillary will not withdraw her candidacy. Her nuclear option is to take her plea to the voter and put her defense on the ballot. Justice cannot be a Quinnipiac poll.
Will Obama pardon Hillary? I don’t believe he would and this also indicates that charges won’t be followed up on by the DoJ. He would be hesitant to absolve them for crimes preemptively (EX PARTE GARLAND) That presidential privilege has historically been used sparingly and only after investigations are mostly complete.
Is Hillary to big to fail? Obama’s unwarranted defense of her is troubling, it sends a message to the FBI and to the Department of Justice and is clearly interfering in an active investigation.
Does being Hillary Clinton constrain the ability to prosecute a criminal case against her? She has little political capital and the ‘power elite’ are opportunistic, but they will stick to her and the omniscient Clinton Global.
Hillary has inexhaustible legal resources to overwhelm the United States Government.
Her SWAT response is to go on the attack and one target is the office of the Inspector General alleging that the office has an anti Clinton agenda.
If she is charged and if we can begin the post-mortem, the greatest irony is that the espionage act is the same mechanism that the Obama administration has relentlessly and aggressively used against whistle blowers, journalists, Edward Snowden and Private Manning