Unlike TOP, this site will remain reality-based, and that goes double for presidential politics.
With that in mind, we need to acknowledge that while Hillary obviously broke the law, she will never suffer from this offense.

“Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service, and because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act,” the audit report said. Bottom line: Mrs. Clinton violated the Federal Records Act.

However, what is probably the most troubling about all of this is that, despite these blatant violations, there will be absolutely no legal repercussions for Mrs. Clinton for this offense. She’s off the hook! Why aren’t all the pundits screaming about that?

As LawNewz.com‘s contributor, Dan Metcalfe, wrote about several weeks ago, anyone who violates this law (and leaves office) will face zero consequences. That’s because it is a civil law, not a criminal law, and penalties only apply to current federal employees. Employees, like Clinton and Powell, who leave office, can skirt punishment. The Federal Records Act is in place not only to provide the American public with some level of transparency but also “to protect the legal and financial rights of the Government and of persons directly affected by the agency’s activities.”

“There are absolutely no penalties provided by law for this misconduct,” Metcalfe said. He would know, Metcalfe was the founding director of the Justice Department’s Office of Information and Privacy. He was essentially “the federal government’s chief information-disclosure ‘guru.’”

“This report unsurprisingly finds gross violations of the Federal Record Act’s requirements by then-Secretary Clinton and her personal staff, not to mention inexplicably poor oversight by State’s top records-management officials as they simply let her do as she pleased,” Metcalfe told LawNewz.com, “Even taking a charitable view, it serves as an indictment of Ms. Clinton’s conduct on the civil side of her ledger, documenting misconduct that would surely lead to dismissal were she still employed there.”

As Metcalfe pointed out, The Federal Records Act, if violated in this way, does allow action to be taken against a government employee– but only administrative action. Both Clinton and Powell are not in office, so they can’t be punished. As for the Freedom of Information Act, there are sanctions provided under (a)(4)(F)(1), but again, those penalties only apply to someone who is still working for the federal government. While there are consequences if you are found to have intentionally destroyed federal records, the audit did not make a finding that this happened.

To put it another way, any dreams of Hillary in handcuffs are fantasies unless evidence of other law breaking emerges.
But Hillary will still have to face the music during a deposition, right? Probably not.

The Obama administration is trying to prevent former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from being deposed in an ongoing open records case connected to her use of a private email server.

Late Thursday evening, the Justice Department filed a court motion opposing the Clinton deposition request from conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch, claiming that the organization was trying to dramatically expand the scope of the lawsuit.

Judicial Watch is “seeking instead to transform these proceedings into a wide-ranging inquiry into matters beyond the scope of the court’s order and unrelated to the FOIA request at issue in this case,” government lawyers wrote in their filing, referring to the Freedom of Information Act.

The Obama Administration has Hillary's back.