In the evidence they found, they couldn't find sufficient intent that she intended to violate the law to suggest persecution to the DA. That's quite different than what you stated and what you posit the FBI stated. Basically the FBI wasn't a mind reader and there wasn't an email that said "hey we should do this to circumvent the foia"

> they couldn't find sufficient intent that she intended to violate the law

This is the problem. It's not their job to find intent but that a crime had been committed and she should have been prosecuted. There are literally THOUSANDS of examples where someone hadn't intended to commit a crime and were punished regardless of that citing the often quoted "ignorance of the law is no excuse".

Hillary knew the law. She should have known better being in her position but she chose to circumvent the rules (for a number of reasons) and as a result the law was broken.

Her escape from prosecution is nothing more than a blatant public travesty of justice.

"should have known better"? C'mon, it's not like she's a lawyer or anything...oh wait.

Breaking the law requires intent or gross negligence, and the FBI said there was no evidence of either (gross negligence being a higher standard than "extreme carelessness").

So what is the evidence that she did have criminal intent?

That's actually fairly hard to prove, and it's not really the FBI's job to make that accusation. Both the Clintons are lawyers so they know what line to not cross apparently. I don't care for her and I don't care for trump either so this election is unfortunate.

This is what intent to break the law looks like:

http://i.imgur.com/NneHu1w.jpg

I don't know what the right answer is here, but I am certain that I don't find incompetence a better excuse than malfeasance.

> This is what intent to break the law looks like:

No it is not. "nonpaper" means scrap off all sensitive data and send it nonsecure. Comey explained what she meant in this email; long version would be: "okay, remove all the sensitive information from this note so that you can lawfully send it via non-secure line; then go ahead and do it".

No intent here.

This is correct, and I'm confused that HN seems to find it downvote-worthy.

When I worked for the State Department, that phrase meant 'digitize it'. When did the meaning change?

1) Talking points don't contain classified information--that's why they are "talking" points.

2) Other evidence showed that this particular set of talking points ended up being sent by secure fax anyway.

1) This is not true.

2) That's why I said this is what intent looks like -- I'm not making any claims about whether she did in fact break any laws. I have no way of knowing that.

> I don't know what the right answer is here, but I am certain that I don't find incompetence a better excuse than malfeasance.

In the United States there are laws regarding criminal negligence, and hypothetically speaking, if someone died as a result of her criminal negligence, it would be considered criminally negligent homicide in most states and could result in prosecution and a real prison sentence.

Would she ever be tried or found guilty of it? Based on the outcome so far, I doubt it; the powerful and connected rarely fall. But the standard does exist.

I would argue that her circumvently the freedom of information laws has illegal intent. Government documents must be oreserved, and she weaseled around that.

Politions' actions should be transparent, at least in a better world.

Anyone who believes Hillary had no self serving design in the email scandal is not paying attention.

You are completely wrong about the findings about Hillary. She was not trying to break the law. She made a stupid decision, she should suffer criminal penalties for it, but she was just an idiot. Let's compare that to something that was found to have occurred with criminal intent:when the Bush administration outed the cia agent, Valerie Plame, that was a clearly intentional illegal action.

The FBI was very clear: it "found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them."

That's not at all what you're saying. The FBI isn't full of psychics, and has no ability to detect intention or read emails that have been permanently deleted.

The "additional work-related emails" referred to in that statement are the "thousands" the FBI did, in fact, recover; that's how they knew they were work-related.