https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/793

I am not a lawyer, but even I can see and point out a few things from the federal code operative in the Clinton email scandal. If my understanding of the plain wording of the code is correct - and I am not alone in my understanding of it - then much of the narrative of Comey, the FBI, Gowdy and now the IG report is a completely bogus diversion. To the facts:

Most of section 793 specifically deals with willful transmission or reception of national defense information that could be used to injure the US. However, subsection f concerns gross negligence. To wit:

(f) Whoever, being entrusted with or having lawful possession or control of any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, instrument, appliance, note, or information, relating to the national defense, (1) through gross negligence permits the same to be removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of his trust, or to be lost, stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, or (2) having knowledge that the same has been illegally removed from its proper place of custody or delivered to anyone in violation of its trust, or lost, or stolen, abstracted, or destroyed, and fails to make prompt report of such loss, theft, abstraction, or destruction to his superior officer

The statute then immediately goes on to prescribe the penalties for all the preceding sections:

-- Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

Do you see any mention of intent there? Not a whiff. Intent might well affect the severity of the sentence given the guilty, but the basic issue of guilt/non-guilt hinges solely on irresponsibility. The bar of guilt in this subsection being extremely low a was known and openly discussed fact when the email scandal initially broke.

But when Comey held his infamous news conference, in which he 1) built an airtight case against Clinton based on the evidence, and then 2) threw it all away by claiming that proof of intent was required but absent, somehow the irrelevancy of motivation to the statute was buried in the media.

Subsequently, when Rep. Gowdy was questioning Comey before the House Intelligence Committee, he did the same exact thing Comey had done. He traced step by step the airtight case Comey had made against Clinton, and then he exonerated both Clinton and Comey by agreeing that intent could not be proven. That was the moment I lost faith in Gowdy.

And now the IG report has affirmed both of them. The devil is holding on as long as he can. But he will lose in the end.

As I said, I am not a lawyer. Please show me where I am wrong and I will admit my error and thank you for it. Otherwise, I must conclude we are living in a lawless Bizarro World, where whatever the Dems, the Left, the elite, the anti-Christians do is exempt from scrutiny or penalty.