Comment by skissane

That's not a counterargument to my position that successful criminal prosecution is unlikely.

If you are going to charge them with a crime, which one? CFAA?

How then to prove that access is unauthorized under the CFAA given evidence that both the President and senior agency leadership authorized it? Trying to claim that those authorizations are legally invalid gets into rather murky areas of law, and is (AFAIK) without precedent. Can you point to any previous cases of a successful CFAA prosecution where the access was authorized by a senior federal official but that authorization was declared legally void?

How do you get past the fact that the law is ultimately whatever SCOTUS says it is, and it seems more likely than not that the majority of current SCOTUS will want to say that this specific situation isn't a crime?

I feel like people are rejecting my position because they don't like it or don't want it to be true. Of course, maybe I'm wrong – maybe Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanagh, Barrett and Roberts are all secretly dreaming of sending Musk and his minions to federal prison; or maybe they'll dispassionately follow their own judicial philosophies to the logical conclusion that doing so (using CFAA or whatever) is statutorily and constitutionally required - but that doesn't seem very likely to me, given their track records. Do you really think I'm wrong about that?