OK, some of you know I've been following Hillary's email woes since March, and some of us have had a bit of a tangle over this, but if you bear with me, you'll see that, on one front, this is good news for Hillary.
Per WaPo:
The company that managed Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server said it has “no knowledge of the server being wiped,” the strongest indication to date that tens of thousands of e-mails that Clinton has said were deleted could be recovered.
Clinton and her advisers have said for months that she deleted her personal correspondence from her time as secretary of state, creating the impression that 31,000 e-mails were gone forever.
There is a distinction between e-mails being deleted and a server being wiped. If e-mails are deleted or moved from a server, they appear to no longer exist on the device. But experts say, depending on the condition of the server, underlying data can remain on the device and the e-mails can often be restored.
This is a strange development. Back in August, MSNBC
reported:
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, two sources with direct knowledge of the process told NBC News on Tuesday.
I assumed that those sources had direct knowledge of the investigation and that there had indeed been a wipe attempt, but it seems they were merely talking about the general 'process'. So what I did was offer some arcane ideas on how such data-recovery wizardry might be accomplished:
First, there is the wiped disk itself. The FBI has a highly capable digital-forensics team. Assuming Team Clinton was smart enough to do a proper wipe rather than a simple delete, there remains the fact that (a) some overwrite software delegates the overwrite task to the erase functionality in the ATA firmware -- this erase functionality often has exploitable idiosyncrasies for data remanence; (b) given the level of classified information, it wouldn't surprise me if they get an inter-agency assist using MFM (magnetic force microscopy) -- some hard disk brands are immune, some aren't.
But this is complete overkill. If this new development holds, there was no wipe attempt at all! Those personal emails can be recovered via straightforward data-recovery techniques.
What this means is those deleted emails are almost certainly coming back from the dead. Because they're personal emails, they'll immediately clear any cloud of suspicion hovering over the deleted emails. And because they're personal emails, Hillary is in no legal trouble for deleting them, because, as the DOJ recently stated, there's nothing wrong with deleting personal emails.
This will be in the news for the next week or two, but this is good news for Hillary.