Final-Fan said:
Clinton has been investigated for decades as part of what she once called a "vast right wing conspiracy". I think it would be more accurate to call what was going on in the 90s a vast right wing conspiracy theory. There are people that actually believe she and her husband rival—if not exceed!—that body count attributed to Capone. I personally think that this has made her somewhat paranoid on issues relating to her own privacy, and I see the email scandal in view of this interpretation of her motivations. By no means does it excuse her behavior, but she wasn't selling state secrets to the Russians or whatever.
I should note that when you say she deliberately deleted emails after being ordered to produce them, the FBI director said that the person who deleted the emails said (after having been granted immunity) that he had been ordered to delete them previously, then panicked when he realized the emails were being demanded and rushed to delete them, and that there was no evidence contradicting this claim. Now, I agree that this account should not be viewed uncritically, but neither should we assume that he must be lying. If he had indeed been told to delete them, he would plausibly have been afraid of consequences if it came out that they had not been deleted. I would say that the plausibility of this claim depends on how much evidence we have of his communications. That is, if we have a whole pile of phone records and emails and so on and there is nothing in them, then it is more likely than if we don't have much at all one way or the other.
But let's look at another angle. You said, "One of the reason why they can't prove anything is because a lot was deleted", but haven't they pretty much recovered the emails? https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/4g4noe/facts_around_hillarys_30000_deleted_personal/
The uranium mine deal is quite concerning, to be honest. It looks like the vast majority of the money came from the guy who used to own the company before the Russians got it. Wikipedia has this to say about the circumstances surrounding that: "In June 2007, Giustra joined with Clinton to launch the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership to address global poverty. Giustra committed $USD 100 million plus half of what he makes in the resource industry for the rest of his life." (the $31 million figure you probably saw in stories is due to that the $100 million was only promised, not delivered fully at the time. I don't know how much of it has been given since. Some of the other donations mentioned might be more of this.) This does not seem like a quid pro quo payoff to me. Nevertheless, given the size of the donations, if I was going to wonder about anything, I'd wonder about the relationship between this man's business interests and the Clintons, but he sold out of this uranium company in 2007, before any of the Rosatom stuff even happened. So for that reason I think the specific allegations are not very likely. More facts available here. There is also no evidence from what I got by skimming articles that Clinton even participated in negotiations whatsoever. The leading accusation seems to be that she would have interfered to oppose the deal if not for this, but stood by and did nothing instead while the State Department and all the other agencies approved the deal by themselves. From what I understand, this argument is based on the fact that a Chinese deal was nixed a couple years previously, but others have argued that we were trying to be chummy with Russia at the time, so perhaps that factored into the decision-making of the non-Clinton people who approved the deal.
P.S. What actually pisses me off the most right now is how so many people in the State Department knew Clinton was doing this (non-standard and potentially unsecure emails) and yet did nothing about it for years and years. I mean I know it was probably like "it was hard anough to get Grandma to use a cell phone, don't even try to get her on a smart phone", but that's no excuse at this level of government. If you really want to know as much as possible about the events leading up to and surrounding this email scandal I just found a site that appears exhaustive and does not seem to be the work of a wacko.
P.P.S. We all know about old people and technology, but we seldom stop to think about the fact that our government is full of old people. Scary.
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