Probe of Clinton’s server could find more than just emails

Now that federal investigators have Hillary Rodham Clinton’s homebrew email server, they could examine files on her machine that would be more revelatory than the emails themselves. Clinton last week handed over to the FBI her private server, which she used to send, receive and store emails during her four years while secretary of state. The bureau is holding the machine in protective custody after the intelligence community’s inspector general raised concerns that classified information had traversed the system. Questions about her use of the server have shadowed her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

Once you get your hands on a hard drive, there’s a lot you can recover.

Computer scientist Darren Hayes

A review of Hillary Clinton’s emails has found that 305 of the messages could contain classified information requiring further review by federal agencies. US State Department lawyers came up with the figure in court documents filed to keep a federal judge abreast of efforts to comply with a scheduled release of the emails in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. Mrs Clinton, a former Secretary of State and a 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, said last month in Iowa it was “pretty clear” she had never sent or received any emails with information clearly marked as classified. Last week, however, the inspector general for the intelligence community reported that two of the emails in Mrs Clinton’s private inbox should have been labelled top secret.

They may have deleted a lot of data, but there’s a lot of data that a good forensics team would be able to recover.

Darren Hayes