If it turns out that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied about not handling classified material on the email server that she maintained, then the presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential contender could find herself facing "jail time," according
The Washington Times.
The newspaper, citing an open records expert, reported: "Mrs. Clinton could face up to three years in prison per message if she is found to have broken her word and handled classified information on the secret account."
Clinton said there were 62,320 emails on the server, of which 30,490 were work-related. The other 31,830 were deleted after being deemed personal, the Times reported.
"So long as she retains possession, sole custody, of her server, which obviously was the point of the server, she has greatly reduced her exposure to legal jeopardy unless or until anyone at the other end of correspondence comes out," said
Christopher Horner, an attorney and senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
"That's the genius of the server. It's the Clinton way: 'You’ll have to spend years and millions of dollars to pry it out of our hands,'" he said.
Horner said Clinton's assertion that she hand not handled classified information on the account was "implausible."
In a case that could foreshadow how a court might treat Clinton, a federal judge last week rejected Horner's request for access to emails from the personal account of the director of the White House science office, the Times reported.
But legal challenges are underway.
The Associated Press said Wednesday that it had filed a lawsuit in federal district court in Washington questioning why the State Department allowed Clinton to keep records on her own server.
"State's failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton's governmental emails were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure timely to seek out and search those emails in response to AP's requests, indicate at the very least that State has not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search that [the Freedom of Information Act] requires," the news organization said.
Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch said that his organization had also filed hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests. "The State Department knew from the beginning these records weren't being searched, and no one told us about it, no one told the courts about it," the Times reported.
"Do not use the word 'private' with respect to her email accounts, because whether they're private or not is frankly a question for the courts to decide," Fitton told the Times.
New York attorney Jerome Reisman drew a parallel between the roughly 30,000 emails Clinton deleted and the 18 minutes of audio that president Richard Nixon's secretary, Rose Mary Woods, deleted from tapes crucial to the Watergate investigation, the Times reported.