What if Clinton were indicted, post-DNC?
Here's a Hollywood story pitch for a political thriller: A major candidate for president is charged with high crimes after sewing up the party nomination at the summer convention. House of Cards meets Game of Thrones.
Here's a Hollywood story pitch for a political thriller: A major candidate for president is charged with high crimes after sewing up the party nomination at the summer convention. House of Cards meets Game of Thrones.
Maybe the scenario sounds a little far-fetched, but it's not inconceivable.
Democrat Hillary Clinton is under FBI investigation, along with top aides, for using a private, unsecured email server to conduct official business as secretary of state in the Obama administration. The traffic included classified information.
She says that in retrospect, she made a mistake but violated no laws.
Yet political operatives and analysts are asking what would happen if Clinton were charged with a crime after the convention adjourns July 28 and the delegates scatter from Philadelphia.
"It would get very messy," said Costas Panagopoulos, a visiting professor of political science at Yale University who has written on the deliberative function of party conventions. "There are lots of open questions."
The question seemed more relevant last week after the State Department's inspector general excoriated Clinton over the servers.
By the time Clinton was secretary of state, the IG's report said, department rules prohibited using private email servers for official correspondence because of "significant security risks." While other top diplomats have used private email at times, Clinton used it exclusively, the report said.
She could be charged with violating the Espionage Act, though most legal experts say that is unlikely because it requires intent and communication with an enemy of the United States or someone unauthorized to see the information. At a minimum, Clinton could be charged with breaking laws related to the proper custody of public records.
"Even if the allegations don't amount to criminal charges, the scandal still creates a political problem," Panagopoulos said. "It feeds into a broader narrative about Clinton's lack of trustworthiness or honesty that has been a barrier to her success."
Democratic Party bylaws - in Article 2, Section 1 - say that the Democratic National Committee has the power to fill "vacancies in the nominations for the office of the president and vice president" when the quadrennial convention is not in session.
Larry Otter, a Bucks County attorney who specializes in election law, said the provision is a safety valve in case a nominee dies, becomes incapacitated, or resigns. But the DNC could not force Clinton out if its leaders decided that a criminal charge made her a liability for the party, he said.
"Once the nomination is voted on at the convention and accepted, it's a fait accompli," Otter said. "A person in that situation would have to abdicate, as it were, in order for there to be a vacancy."
Experts can point to just one precedent in modern times. In 1972, Missouri Sen. Thomas Eagleton was nominated to run as the Democratic vice presidential candidate alongside George McGovern. But Eagleton had not disclosed his medical history of depression, including three hospital stays and two bouts of electroshock therapy, and he resigned from the ticket 18 days after the party's convention.
In an emergency session, the DNC ratified McGovern's choice for a replacement running mate: Sargent Shriver, President John F. Kennedy's brother-in-law. Shriver was the first director of the Peace Corps and was the architect of President Lyndon B. Johnson's antipoverty agenda.
This year, it was the Republican nominating process that was expected to get messy, considering the resistance to Donald Trump from powerful conservative activists and party leaders, but polls indicate the real estate investor has begun to consolidate his support since clinching the GOP nomination.
Clinton is still trying to stamp out brush fires from Sen. Bernie Sanders' challenge but is favored to win the nomination based on the delegate math. To do so, however, she needs to retain the backing of the majority of the Democrats' superdelegates - party and elected officials who are free to vote as they wish at the convention.
"The party establishment might balk at having the ticket led by someone mired in a national-security scandal or by Mr. Sanders, a socialist and independent who has never before sought election as a Democrat or attended a state or national convention," Republican strategist Karl Rove wrote in a May 18 Wall Street Journal commentary. He suggested Vice President Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry as potential replacements.
Trump has used the email scandal to try to brand Clinton as "Crooked Hillary." Following the inspector general's report, he questioned whether he'd even face her this fall.
"It could be we're going to run against Crazy Bernie," Trump said on the campaign trail last week. "He's a crazy man, but that's OK. We like crazy people."
The good news for the Democrats is that Trump also has low poll ratings for honesty and worse numbers than Clinton on the questions of temperament and readiness to be president.
"I said this many times, it was still a mistake" to conduct all email correspondence on a private server, Clinton said Thursday in an interview with Meet the Press Daily.
"If I could go back, I would do it differently," she said. "And I understand people have concerns about this, but I hope and expect voters to look at the full picture of everything I've done and stand for. And the full threat posed by Donald Trump."
215-854-2718@tomfitzgerald