Hillary Clinton insists she is in the clear over the email controversy that continues to dog her —
and renowned civil rights lawyer Alan Dershowitz is in total agreement.
Dershowitz, appearing on
Newsmax TV's "The Hard Line" with Ric Blackwell, said the leading Democratic presidential candidate can't be singled out for using a private email server and cellphone during her time as secretary of state since laws governing the issue didn't exist at the time.
"She's 100 percent right. The Constitution — not even the Bill of Rights, but the Constitution's body itself — prohibits ex post facto laws and so she must be judged on what the rules were at the time she took her actions," Dershowitz said.
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"At the time she took her actions, there was nothing wrong with having a private cell phone. Would I have advised her to do it? No, of course not. There was no classification.
"The classification came later.
"You can't apply retroactive classification or retroactive rules to conduct that occurred when there were no rules prohibiting it. From a legal point of view, she's 100 percent right."
On Saturday,
Clinton said she never knowingly sent or received classified information via her private server, despite the findings by two inspectors general that Clinton's server contained classified data.
Dershowitz — a Harvard Law professor emeritus and author of,
"Terror Tunnels: The Case for Israel's Just War Against Hamas," published by RosettaBooks — said Clinton should indicate that she complied with the law at the time.
"She has to produce what the rules were, what the practice was in the State Department. She has to ask questions. If this material's being classified now, why wasn't it classified then? It wasn't her job to classify the material. It wasn't the State Department's job to classify the material," he said.
"The idea of saying to somebody that you should have known this would've been classified years later and we're going to hold you accountable for that, violates the spirit if not the letter of ex post facto provision of the Constitution."
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