Hillary Clinton, and her attorneys who have helped delete her e-mails, have committed the serious federal crime of obstruction of justice. 

In an op-ed today at the Wall Street Journal (behind the paywall), legal professor Ronald D. Rotunda of Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law and the co-author, with John Nowak, of Treatise on Constitutional Law, mentions any action to destroy information that is subject to subpoena, or may even become subject to investigation in the future:

The law says that no one has to use email, but it is a crime (18 U.S.C. section 1519) to destroy even one message to prevent it from being subpoenaed. Prosecutors charging someone with obstruction don’t even have to establish that any investigation was pending or under way when the deletion took place.

Professor Rotunda explains also that records such as Hillary's e-mails, even those she asserts were "personal," could not be deleted or destroyed, even if nobody had yet asked for them – although numerous FOIA requests had been made to the State Department before she claims to have performed her deletion of "private e-mails."

Legal commentators call this “anticipatory obstruction of justice,” and the law punishes it with up to 20 years imprisonment. The burden of proof is light. The Justice Department manual advises that section 1519 makes prosecution much easier because it covers “any matters” or “’in relation to or contemplation of’ any matters.”

Additionally, attorneys who advise destruction of records, or participate in doing so, are also in violation of the law and subject to disbarment.  Hillary, being a lawyer herself, would be also.

Now if only our ruling class would take action against one of their own, just as they recently did to General David Petraeus, the phenomenon of the Clinton dynasty would be gone forever.