Hillary Rodham Clinton abided by the requests of Justice Department to access her severs — by turning over a chunk of junk.
Barbara Wells, an attorney representing Platte River Networks said that the much-sought-after server turned in by Clinton “was blank.”Wells was speaking on behalf of the Denver based computer company that maintained the server for Clinton.
Speaking to Washington Post, Wells said, “The information had been migrated over to a different server for purposes of transition.” She added, “To my knowledge, the data on the old server is not available now on any servers or devices in Platte River Networks’ control.”
Addressing the Washington Post, computer professionals said that by eliminating the content, Clinton made it complicated, but not impossible to retrieve her mails.
A reliable federal law-enforcement officer informed the Post, “If you delete a large file and then write over it with a smaller file, then you may be able to ¬retrieve the data that was not written over.” Explaining the technicalities, the experts said, “If somebody uses software program to scrub the hard drive clean, that’s problematic.”
However, another specialist said the FBI agents have successfully captured data in cases where the suspects thought it was not retrievable.
According to Clinton, she gave the state department access to her office emails and then cleaned her server.
Clinton wiped off about 30,000 individual emails but was keen to back-up the official ones on thumb drives that were part of the package turned over to the authorities.
Complying with an order of the federal court, advocates for a couple of Clinton’s top aides, Cheryl Mills and Huma Abedin, promised a judge on Wednesday that the aides will not get rid of any of their formal emails.
On Thursday, Clinton’s campaign said there is nothing to be retrieved from her server. In a statement, the campaign said, “As David Kendall [Clinton’s lawyer] said in March, we do not believe any e-mails from her time as secretary exist on the server.”
The Denver-based computer firm, Platte River said it began working for Clinton after she left office, in June 2013, to secure, manage and upgrade her email server.
According to the company spokesperson, Andy Boian, the company moved the server from her home in New York and had it housed at a New Jersey data center.
Wells could not be reached on phone for information on whether the content was still retrievable. The time of wiping the server clean and migrating to a new server remains unclear.
One security specialist said a lot of questions remain unanswered. “They are saying they migrated that data somewhere. Where is the somewhere?” asked the security specialist, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal consequences from his bosses. “What happened to the data that was transferred, and is the new server following any of the regulations it’s supposed to?” he wondered.
The FBI is now investigating whether another copy is still in existence or was also destroyed. Of interest to investigators is Hillary’s request for the book ‘SEND: Why People Email So Badly And How To Do It Better’ by David Shipley. Chapter six of that book covers how to delete email such that it cannot be recovered.
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