Referral for Clinton perjury probe could come next week

[moonshaz]

The House Oversight Committee is expected to send a formal request asking the FBI to open a criminal investigation into allegations that Hillary Clinton lied to Congress as soon as next week, a committee aide told The Hill.

Comments

[invisiblegirlx]

Well...she kinda did lie? I doubt this will go anywhere though.

[hudebnik]

As the article points out, a perjury charge requires not only saying something that isn't true under oath, but saying so "willfully and knowingly". I don't think "willfully" is a heavy lift in this case -- she said pretty clearly and forcefully, as a complete sentence, that none of the emails were marked classified -- but "knowingly" is harder, because one would have to show that she knew, at the time of the testimony, that some of them WERE marked classified

[ms_mmelissa]

She did lie but I think the Comey hearing actually made a really great case for why she didn't knowingly lie i.e. it was a few emails out of tens of thousands and they were improperly marked so it's very possible she either forgot or never knew in the first place.

[moonshaz]

Exactly. In this article it just says they were marked with a C. I don't know where that C was, but it seems to me that it would awfully easy to miss a single character like that--or write it off as a random typo, which is what I'd probably do myself.

It sounds like me like the State Dept. may really need to take a close look at how they mark things that are supposed to be classified information, because that doesn't seem at all adequate to me.

[ms_mmelissa]

I watched the hearings and Comey said that they're supposed to marked clearly at the top of emails with the (c) classification but these were CHAIN emails where somewhere in the body of the chain there were only some paragraphs marked C and someone pointed out that in a few cases the material wasn't even classified, someone had improperly marked them so.

Not saying it wasn't a mess and she didn't do wrong but I honestly don't think she was being malicious in any way though the Republicans are sure trying to paint her that way.

[moonshaz]

Yes, the Repubs definitely want to believe she was being malicious and/or mishandling classified info in a KNOWING, CALCULATED way and then deliberately lying about it (I believe the opposite, obviously), and I agree they'll never give up trying to paint her that way. I just hope we can make Congress (both Houses) a lot more blue this fall; otherwise her entire presidency will be filled with bullshit distractions like this.

[lozbabie]

For something to be a lie don't you have to be aware its a lie?