Comey never said her actions were "illegal". The only people who seem to disagree with Comey on mens rea...are ignorant, rabid, partisan Clinton haters. But fortunately, we are still a nation of laws....not partisan mob rule.
Actually the entity who disagrees with Comey on Mens Rea is
18 U.S. Code § 793 - Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information:
...(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...
I made two of those words kinda more noticeable than the others - can you tell us what they are, Moot?
“We could not prove that the people sending the information, either in that case or in the other case with the secretary, were acting with any kind of the mens rea — with any kind of criminal intent,” Mr. Comey said.
Exactly. Comey chose not to apply the law, but rather to apply a standard that allowed him to avoid applying the law. He declared that they had only been guilty of "Extreme Careless", which was somehow different than "Gross Negligence". :shrug:
Did Clinton knowingly, willfully, intend to harm or injure the national defense?
In order to avoid admitting that she had, Clinton testified to the FBI agents that she did not know what a classification marking was.
She was a Original Classifying Authority at the time.
To put that in perspective, this is like the head of your States' DMV claiming that he shouldn't be held liable for the accident, because he didn't know what a red light meant.
So... if you want to argue that
Hillary Clinton was utterly incompetent to the most basic tasks of her job, then you could, with intellectual consistency, argue that she lacked intent. If you want to give her credit for at least the level of reading comprehension I expected (and got) out of 19 year olds whom I managed in the Marine Corps, however.... not so much.
Did any of the emails that were sent to or received on her server relate to, harm or injure the national defense? Did she knowingly send classified emails to anyone she didn't know or trust?
Whether she trusted them or not is immaterial - the system she sent them over is what is relevant.
For example, I trust plenty of the people I work with currently. I would never send them a classified email over gmail, because that would be
illegal.
What State Department or NARA rules or regulations regarding emails did she knowingly, willfully, intend to violate or was "grossly negligent" in handling?
18 USC 793
18 USC 798
18 USC 1924
Executive Order 13526. Additionally, though compared to the multiple felonies above it's kinda small ball, she also violated the terms of her
SF 312, which is a lifelong, binding contract with the US Government.
Did Clinton have the authority to classify and declassify any information in her custody?
Clinton had the authority to declassify
State Department information. The majority of her classified emails
look like that is what they were, as they were CONFIDENTIAL, and that is where a lot of State correspondence is kept at. CONFIDENTIAL material cannot go into a regular email system - there is a separate system known as
SIPRNet to handle those communications, and it is
illegal to transmit them or store them in non-classified information settings or systems. But, if she really wanted to push it, she could claim that - in every single instance of exposure of State information, which would sorta boggle the mind - she was forced by circumstances to use her OCA authority to declassify that information without going through the process of doing so.
Clinton did
not have the authority to declassify CIA or NSA data, which was also present in her emails.
"no reasonable attorney would prosecute."
We have prosecuted for this, actually. Successfully too. As I understand it, it was claimed those examples didn't count, because they were of military members.