It is getting a little bit unseemly to hear Democratic analysts and liberal voices in the punditariat latching on one of the more desperate hopes of Republicans who would rather not run against Hillary Rodham Clinton—namely, that she's going to be questioned by the FBI and subsequently indicted for something in connection with the great email nothingburger. Today's entrant is the increasingly hilarious H.A. Goodman, whose devotion to the notion that The Great Bernie Wave Is Just Around The Corner has become positively Millerite in its fervor. (Scott at Lawyers, Guns, and Money is H.A.'s most diligent chronicler.) Anyway, on Wednesday, after Sanders won a substantial victory at the polls in Wisconsin, and a considerably less substantial one as far as the delegate count goes, H.A. pronounced his heart lightened by the prospect of HRC getting tangled up with the Feds.

Nonetheless, there are people questioning the logic of voting for a person linked to an FBI investigation. An article by Ronald J. Sievert in USA Today titled "Hillary's 'classified' smokescreen hides real crime" highlights the case for DOJ indictment.

Before we get into the nub of the gist here, let's take a look at Mr. Sievert's author's note at the end of the column.

Ronald J. Sievert, a 25-year veteran of the Department of Justice, teaches national security and international law at the George H.W. Bush School of Government at Texas A&M University and the University of Texas School of Law.

Well, alright then. But he did work in the DOJ under both Republicans and Democrats, and he seems to be more of a national security fetishist than anything else—so we'll give him a pass for the moment as regards his present gig. What Sievert is arguing is that HRC could still be indicted even if the information found in her emails was never classified at all, or classified ex post facto.

The applicable statute, 18 USC793, however, does not even once mention the word "classified." The focus is on "information respecting the national defense" that potentially "could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation." 793 (f) specifically makes it a crime for anyone "entrusted with … any document ... or information relating to the national defense … through gross negligence (to permit) the same to be removed from its proper place of custody." A jury (not a Democrat or Republican political administration) is, of course, the best body to determine gross negligence on the facts of this case.

(Yeah, I saw the tell in there, too—"not a Democrat or Republican administration." Jesus, that is the dumbest tic in the conservative vocabulary.)

If Mr. Sievert and our buddy H.A. think that the current Department of Justice is going to indict the frontrunner for the Democratic—see, Ronald? it's easy when you try—presidential nomination based on a semantic quibble in the applicable statute, they've both been sampling their own product much too often. (Sievert pretty much admits this is the case by the end of his column, although he finds the whole thing deplorable.) Honestly, HRC raised $29 million in March and she's coming into a couple of wheelhouse primaries, and she's still ahead anyway. My world should collapse so handsomely.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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