US Criminal Code, Title 18, Section 1924 which provides that any government employee [i.e., Secretary of State] who "becomes possessed of documents or materials containing classified information of the United States, knowingly removes such documents or materials without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than one year, or both." Clinton's private email server was a known unauthorized location that retained classified documents. Clinton's intent would be argued at trial.
US Criminal Code, Title 18, section 793 which applies to the mishandling of defense information (presumably shared with the State Department) and provides that anyone convicted "Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both." (Arguably there is a prima facie case, a case clear on the known facts, that Clinton has committed a felony under this and other laws.)
Additionally, when she became Secretary of State, Clinton signed a formal "Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement" between herself and the United States. The agreement states that "classified information is marked or unmarked classified information, including oral communications." The agreement says Clinton "received a security indoctrination" and understood it. In the agreement, Clinton agrees to share information only with authorized persons, and to determine in advance who is authorized, and further: "I understand that if I am uncertain about the classification status of information, I am required to confirm from an authorized official that the information is unclassified before I may disclose it"."
Will we be seeing a July surprise or a September surprise or"?
The FBI has interviewed a number of State Department employees and Clinton aides, but has not yet interviewed Clinton herself, according to The Hill on May 8, based on the views of people outside the investigation. The Hill, an inside-the-beltway journal which calls this "decision time for the FBI on Clinton," editorializes that it expects a happy ending for the candidate: "The end of the investigation would be a relief for Clinton and her allies, who have faced questions for months over her exclusive use of the personal server." An indictment of any sort, no matter how minor the offense, would not be such a happy ending for Clinton, and the basis for an indictment appears minimally solid, since laws have clearly been violated, whether intentionally or not.
Of course the case is quintessentially political, made all the moreso with a target who is currently the leading Democratic candidate for her party's presidential nomination, creating a host of questions for people who must be under remarkable pressure to get it right, whatever "get it right" means in a given context:
Will the FBI present a full and accurate case that withstands reasonable public scrutiny?
Will the Democratic Attorney General allow even a compelling case to lead to an indictment of her party's candidate?
Will the Democratic President allow such a case to threaten Clinton?
There's no way to know, and much depends on timing. An indictment before the convention is likely to have a very different impact from an indictment between the convention and the election. An indictment after the election would depend for its impact on whether or not Clinton was then the president-elect.
Similarly, a decision not to indict Clinton would have impact depending to great extant on the same timing factors. Additionally, a decision not to indict would have greater or lesser impact depending on the strength of the evidence, or on whether the evidence was made public promptly. For example, Clinton running against a Donald Trump screaming "cover-up" is not a pretty picture, regardless of the validity of the claim.
The failure to indict Clinton would provoke something of a crisis in the FBI and intelligence services, according to some who claim to know people inside the agencies who have seen the evidence. This is possibly a bluff, but it is also possibly the basis for President Obama's equivalent of the 1973 Saturday Night Massacre when President Nixon tried to shut down the Watergate investigation.
However the Clinton email server story comes down, the consequences are uncertain. Full disclosure of all the emails, for example, might answer the complaints of Haitians in recent years that Bill and Hillary Clinton, and the Clinton Foundation, have stolen billions of dollars meant to be used for rebuilding Haiti, still devastated six years after the 2010 earthquake. Haitians protesting against the Clintons in Haiti and at the Clinton Foundation in New York have generated little media attention, even though protestors claim Clinton used her position as Secretary of State to help loot Haiti. According to Dahoud Andre of the Committee Against Dictatorship in Haiti:
"We are telling the world of the crimes that Bill and Hillary Clinton are responsible for in Haiti. And we are telling the American people that the over 32,000 emails that Hillary Clinton said she deleted have evidence of the crimes they have committed."
Clinton's indictment isn't the only the elephant in the room. Stay tuned.
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