One question has been circulating through the minds of the American community over the past year: Who will become the next President of The United States? This has been arguably the most hotly debated topic of the past year. And for good reason, as there are a large amount of candidates who are promising substantial changes and improvements to society. Within the Republican Party, there are many candidates that are looking to present their potential policies to the people of the nation in hopes that they garner enough credibility and respect to gain approval. At the moment, the man who has gained the biggest following and the most support for this party has been Donald Trump. With his unusually sarcastic yet serious approach to U.S. policies and his plans of ending illegal immigration through the construction of a large wall, he has impacted the American community in a positive way to gain a large following very fast. Same goes for many of the other members of the Republican party, who stay strictly focused on the future of our nation and how to make it better. This applies to members of the Democratic parties as well, but they take different approaches as to focus more on the well-being of the people of our nation. These individuals want to ensure that the people all have enough money and resources available to them to sustain a good lifestyle and be positioned well in life. At the same time, they are very focused to the national and foreign policies that help keep the country running as efficiently as possible. Even though these candidates are working hard to make their case as believable as possible, there is one candidate who has been accused of a very serious offense that could not only affect her political standing, but whether or not she ends up in prison for her deeds. The person I am talking about is none other than the Democratic party's leading candidate Hillary Clinton. Nine months ago, Clinton was accused of using a private email server to send confidential information regarding the location of several military deployments in Benghazi. At first, this may not seem like a big deal, but it must be noted that these servers are very easy to hack into and steal information from. And without knowing who could take hold of this information and what they could do with it, this becomes a serious issue. Since the conviction, long and extensive searches have been done to determine whether the emails sent out were truly confidential or simply false alarm. In spite of all of the confusion and mayhem that has taken place in the wake of this scandal, I believe that Hillary Clinton should be convicted and tried for her actions in recent years.

Before formally introducing the topic described above, we must first introduce Hillary Clinton and all she has done throughout her career. She is most well known for being former First Lady of the United States of America, being married to former President Bill Clinton. Since her time in the White House with her husband, Mrs. Clinton has been very involved in the national political scene, serving as the Senator of New York from 2001 to 2009. She even garnered enough support over her time as senator to take a shot at running for President of The United States in the 2008 election. Unfortunately for her, she did not win the primaries for the Democratic election, so she was out of the race early, as she lost to current President Obama. From that point, she went on to be elected as the 67th Secretary of State, where her political power and popularity would take off. She kept the United States in contact with the leaders of the foreign worlds, letting them know U.S. policy changes were coming to make things better. Such policies were directed towards erasing the national debt by establishing better global economic strategies. She has also played a big part in the military and knowing the whereabouts of certain deployments. She was a figurehead following the attacks in Benghazi, as she spoke about the crisis and tried to bring those together who were affected by it. However, her affiliation with the military and the internet might have gotten the best of her as of recently.

On March 3, 2015, The New York Times revealed to the world that Hillary Clinton had been using her private email server for official government business. Now this may not seem like a huge issue at first thought, but one must go back in time to understand why this topic has become so hotly debated. The entire timeline is detailed in a video by Stefan Molyneux titled, "The Truth About Hillary Clinton's Email Controversy," The whole process began back in January 2009 when Mrs. Clinton registered "clintonemail.com" as a private server in New York, which is where she would proceed to send and receive her work and personal information. She had made the transition from using her account that was provided to her for when she was Senator of New York to this private server. This was not considered an issue in any way until new standards for federal agency heads were established by the National Archives and Records Committee. These new standards stated that all emails relating to official government business were to be archived as records under the Federal Records Act. Two years passed before anything else regarding the issue came into play, and this two year period was ended by the attacks on Benghazi. Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain all Benghazi-related emails from members of the State Department. This is when strange events began to occur, as Mrs. Clinton claimed to have obtained a concussion from a fall not long after the incident, leading to the cancellation of trips to North Africa and the Middle East to speak on behalf of the issue. This concussion was later revealed to have formed a blood clot in her brain which would ultimately lead to the end of her term as Secretary of State in February 2013. And with the end of her term came the publication of her email address that she had used over that time period. The significance of this event was the fact that a hacker had formerly published the account, so the department wanted to make the publication official as soon as possible. Another hacker had later hacked into her account again to discover she was sending and receiving confidential information from this public, unsecured address. The issue was once again ignored for a long period of time until August 2014, when the State Department physically handed over eight emails from Clinton's private account to prove she was using a private email address. This indirectly motivated the National Archives to issue new standards on emails. These standards indicated that government officials should not use their personal emails for official business, simply use their work email. Shortly after the new standards were issued, the State Department became very concerned about the gravity of the situation and requested the emails from the private servers of several different members, including Clinton. Now is where things start to come together and suggest something happening through the emails because in November 2014, The House Select Committee requested to see the emails regarding the Benghazi attacks, because Mrs. Clinton had apparently sent over 300 emails to the committee. President Obama then hears about the emails and releases and updated Federal Records Act, stating that officials must forward all work-related emails to their government address for security reasons. Stated by Molyneux in his video, "Clinton and her office then respond by manually printing and handing in 30,490 emails. It was soon noted by the State Department that there were actually 31,830 emails within the account, but the remaining ones were deemed private and withheld." This controversy later led the House Benghazi Committee that Clinton never had a government email address and the emails were never known of until they were handed over in December 2014. All of this culminated to the New York Times officially releasing the news to the public that Clinton used a private server for her work email and violated federal regulations by doing so. Clinton then went on to change her story twice regarding the emails she sent and received, leading to the FBI taking custody of her server and thumb drives. This all lead to the confirmation of 22 top secret emails within the account that could not be released in any form. Some other emails contained information that could potentially jeopardize "sources, methods, and lives." To think that lives were put in danger through these emails is a lot to fathom. 

Through the midst of all of this information and all of the truths being released to the public, the issue has sparked a lot of debate, mostly in favor of Clinton being guilty of her actions. But in order to truly form a solid opinion on the issue, both sides must be looked at in depth to determine what others with more credibility have to say. The easiest side to look at would be the majority that believe Mrs. Clinton is guilty of her actions and should be put in jail. Since the emails have been turned over to the FBI, there have been more emails that have surfaced, "more than 1,300 emails that passed through her server found to contain information that has since been classified, some at the highest levels" said Julian Hattem of The Hill. This means that there is a large amount of information relative to her government work that has not been turned over to the State Department. This is already an offense in itself, as she is not following the acts that were just recently updated in response to her controversy. What's even worse is the fact that there are officially 22 emails that have been marked with the highest classification of secretive that have not been read by anyone except Clinton and the sender/receiver. There were, however, advisors that were monitoring her actions that could be facing some penalties themselves if discovered they allowed these emails to happen. According to research done by Andrew McCarthy on a quote by columnist Paul Sperry, "the FBI is focusing on three top Clinton aides at the State Department -- chief-of-staff Cheryl Mills and deputies Huma Abedin and Jake Sullivan -- as the potential culprits who carried out Clinton's suspected scheme to defeat classified information protections." Either way, Clinton already did perform government work through her private email server, but she did turn in a large majority of those documents. This has led to many are having a hard time deciding whether or not to convict her.

On the other hand, there are the very select few in the world today that stand by Mrs. Clinton, saying that she did nothing wrong and the nation is stressing over nothing at all. For example, a short piece published by Max Fisher of Vox, he goes into a brief synopsis of the 22 emails that are being withheld and have been marked as top secret. He then goes into detail to say that the labels that have been placed on the emails could turn out to be completely false. Much of the information found within the emails could have nothing to do with her government work and could simply be about her personal life. Within the piece, Fisher explains the reason he thinks the way he does by saying, "if they were immediately classified top secret, then that is a good sign that they contained information that is known as 'born lassified'," He then goes on to talk about how the emails were placed under watch after a good amount of time had passed and nobody had said anything about the issue. He then references the problems with over classification back to the Reagan administration with the slogan, "When in doubt, classify." While I can see where he is getting his points and has the ability to present his information well, Fisher failed to note or acknowledge that a large majority of the emails have already been investigated by the FBI and determined to have government work within them. 

After looking at both sides presented by the American public, I have decided that I believe Hillary Clinton did commit a federal crime and should be tried and jailed for her wrongdoings. Through all of the research that really didn't have to be as complicated as it was, it was discovered recently that Clinton was discussing the locations of important officials in Benghazi through the emails that were going in and out of this unsecured portal. Even if the emails themselves were not obtained by hackers in time for use in Benghazi, giving away the locations of important American figures in a foreign country is still a serious offense, as that information was labeled top secret at the time. In addition to the potential deaths of individuals in foreign countries, she was also performing official government business through this server and did not provide all of the emails to the State Department after the Federal Records Act was officially updated. Also, in a recent news report done by MSNBC, they detailed that Clinton was openly using the address on her Blackberry and the State Department did not want her even using the device within her office. However, she went and did it anyways, and it got her into a huge mess of trouble that she is still trying to fight her way out of. Now one may be wondering why this would matter to anyone outside of the government. Note that this is the woman who is leading the race for the Democratic nomination. If she gets the nomination, she could potentially go on to become the next President of The United States, and then our country would become famous for having a criminal heading the way. Just think, America. Do we really want a woman who potentially put the lives of thousands of undercover agents and figureheads in danger and conducted top secret business through a server that could have easily gotten hacked, while there was already an address provided to her that was monitored for hackers nonstop? This is the question we must ask ourselves.

