Hillary’s emails: Deleted but not gone

By: American Decency Staff

As House Republican leaders weigh whether to try to force former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to hand over her personal email server, experts say the messages she deleted from it — or at least portions of them — can almost certainly be recovered.

Half a dozen computer forensics experts interviewed by POLITICO said remnants of Clinton’s emails likely still exist on the server, although retrieving them could be time intensive and expensive.

Clinton’s attorney David Kendall on Friday wrote Benghazi Committee Chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), declining the committee’s request for the server to be turned over to an independent third party. The committee said it wants a third party to verify that all Benghazi-related emails were in fact turned over to the panel—especially after Clinton acknowledged deleting anything determined to be “personal” messages.

Kendall called the request pointless, saying Clinton’s IT staff had confirmed to him the messages are gone for good.

But permanent deletion is extremely difficult to achieve, the experts said. Enterprise servers built in the last decade or so are increasingly designed to preserve emails more rigorously, either as a document trail in case of a lawsuit, to comply with industry regulations or to allow system administrators to “idiot proof” their systems so they can save the day when non-technically proficient executives accidentally delete emails.

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