NBC’s headline says the FBI is “optimistic” it can recover data from Hillary Clinton’s email server. That must have put Clintonworld in a deeply pessimistic mood.
It wouldn’t take much recovered data to take this story to a whole new level. Service logs could easily demonstrate further violations of classified and Top Secret protocol by users who were not cleared to see such information. Anything that proves Clinton omitted documents from her submission to the State Department, or deleted vital documents along with her yoga workout routines and cookie recipes, would be as much of a game-changer as the discovery of Top Secret material on her server was.
“The FBI may be able to recover at least some data from Hillary Clinton’s private email server even though there was an attempt to wipe it,” according to two sources “with direct knowledge of the process” who spoke to NBC News.
One of the sources added that the Bureau’s technicians will “try to figure out what’s there, how it got there, and who put it there.”
It’s not clear from the NBC report exactly which machine the FBI thinks it can recover data from. There seem to be several Clinton servers in play. Her computer company, Platte River Networks, was reportedly involved in migrating her data from the machine she used for most of her Secretary of State tenure to a different computer. The first machine – the one Hillary disingenuously boasted of as inherited from the Bill Clinton White House, to give the impression her operation had White House levels of security – was abandoned early on, due to its age.
Reports earlier this week suggested Platte River might have kept a full backup of Clinton’s data, perhaps created during the server migration, but the NBC report makes it sound like the FBI is conducting data recovery operations on a computer that had been deliberately wiped clean. If the FBI is working so hard to resuscitate the data from the wiped machine, it would seem to suggest the rumors of an intact backup of Clinton’s data did not pan out… unless the feds are plumbing Clinton’s server for information beyond what a backup would have contained, such as system activity logs, or they’re trying to extract enough from the server to verify that a backup created by the computer company is accurate and complete.
That phrase “attempt to wipe it” must be causing some heartburn over at Clinton HQ. If there’s one thing she expected her apartment-loft bathroom-server Denver computer company to be good at, it’s wiping hard drives.
While we’re on the subject, who brings in a team of IT experts to wipe their systems after deleting a bunch of personal emails of no great importance, anyway?
Hillary Clinton has never gotten anywhere near a good explanation for the hasty server wipe. The 32,000-odd emails she deleted wouldn’t even take up all that much storage space, by the standards of modern computer systems. She’s got a roughly equal volume of emails she didn’t delete tucked away on thumb drives, after all.
Clinton created endless problems for both herself and the country by wiping that system, and it’s painfully obvious why she did it. Even some liberals have lately been moaning that if she hadn’t nuked all that data, she could clear up her problems in a jiffy. (Well, that’s what they were wishing before the Top Secret information was found – not even the full recovery of her system data would make that go away.)
You’re the Secretary of State, you’re planning to run for President, you know it was highly irregular to set up your own private email server… and even though you’re adamant that nothing untoward was sent through that server, you make a point of blowing the whole thing to kingdom come and guaranteeing that you look like the villain in a scandal potboiler? And you supposedly only set up the private system in the first place for… convenience?
How does anything she did with that server, or anything she’s done as the scandal unfolded, reflect positively on her judgment?
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