Clinton aide reported to have walked out of FBI interview

[paulthompson]

131. Yes

This is a whole other can of worms.

I talked about it in the essay I wrote a week ago:

http://thompsontimeline.com/IS_CLINTON'S_EMAIL_SCANDAL_FOR_REAL%3F

Specifically, this part:

How do we know the FBI has recovered Clinton's deleted emails?

In late August 2015, a week after the FBI took possession of Clinton's private email server, Clinton's campaign acknowledged "that there was an attempt to wipe her server before it was turned over last week to the FBI. But two sources with direct knowledge of the investigation told NBC News... that the bureau may be able to recover at least some data." In September 2015, Bloomberg News reported that, "Once the emails have been extracted, a group of agents has been separating personal correspondence and passing along work-related messages to agents leading the investigation..." That same month, The New York Times reported that according to two unnamed government officials, "It was not clear whether the entire trove of roughly 60,000 emails had been found on the server, but one official said it had not been very hard for the FBI to recover the messages." In late March 2016, the Los Angeles Times reported that since the FBI took possession of Clinton's private server on August 12, 2015, the FBI has "recovered most, if not all, of the deleted correspondence, said a person familiar with the investigation."

That the FBI did not find it hard to recover the emails says to me that all of her deleted emails have been recovered. Furthermore, there were multiple copies of her server, so the FBI probably didn't have any trouble at all if only one server copy was wiped – that is, overwritten repeatedly so that old data cannot be recovered. When a company named Platte River Networks took over management of Clinton's email server in mid-2013, it transferred all the contents of her server onto a new server and managed that, but also kept the old server, and the FBI eventually took possession of both servers. Plus, Platte River Networks had a contract with another company called Datto, which made monthly copies of the server in the cloud. But Platte River Networks didn't know this was happening since they didn't ask for it or pay for it, and they only found out about it after the FBI had taken the servers away.

Did Clinton obstruct the investigation?

The Datto monthly backups not only would ensure the FBI had copies of all the deleted emails, but also would also allow the FBI to figure out which month the emails were deleted. Clinton has never indicated when the deletion happened; she could be in more trouble if it happened after December 2014, when the State Department formally asked for copies of all her emails.

Clinton's lawyer David Kendall has asserted that the server was never wiped. He has said the emails were merely deleted in the normal way one deletes email from one's inbox, and then they were permanently deleted after 30 or 60 days in the deletion folder. But the NBC News report mentioned above specifically says the emails were wiped. That's another indicator of destruction of evidence.

Wiping those deleted emails further suggests there was material in them that Clinton didn't want the FBI to see. Keep in mind that Clinton has said that she turned over not only all her emails that were work-related emails, but also any that may have been in doubt just to be on the safe side. On August 10, 2015, just two days before the FBI took possession of her servers, she even signed the following statement under oath: "I have directed that all my emails on clintonemail.com in my custody that were or potentially were federal records be provided to the Department of State, and on information and belief, this has been done."

However, we know that Clinton didn't turn over all her work-related emails, because on at least three separate occasions since she turned over her 30,000 emails, more have turned up. The State Department permanently archived far less than one percent of all emails during Clinton's time as secretary of state, so Clinton probably figured she didn't have to worry too much about other copies of her emails showing up.

But senders also keep copies of email messages. In September 2015, one month after Clinton's oath, about ten emails between Clinton and General David Petraeus were found by the Defense Department. These were from January and February 2009, the first two months of Clinton's time as secretary of state, despite the fact that she firmly claimed that she didn't start using her email account until March 18, 2009.

Additionally, when Clinton confidant Sid Blumenthal testified before the House Benghazi Committee in June 2015, he brought 60 Libya-related emails between himself and Clinton that the committee didn't have already. He probably felt obliged to turn them over because he believed they were known after a hacker named Guccifer broke into his email account in 2013 and took screenshots of his inbox as well as individual emails. The State Department found that all of nine and parts of six emails handed over by Blumenthal were missing from the 30,000 emails Clinton had turned over. The New York Times reported two months later, "The Clinton campaign has not explained the discrepancy." It is probable there are more emails between Clinton and Blumenthal still to see the light of day, since Blumenthal was obliged to turn over the only Libya-related ones to the House Benghazi Committee.

In late March 2016, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the State Department turned over two more Clinton work-related emails that were not in the 30,000 emails Clinton had turned over already. This shows that The State Department has more Clinton emails that it won't turn over unless lawsuits force them to. That lawsuit had a very specific target of emails relating to Clinton's discussions of her iPhone or BlackBerry use. No doubt, a State Department search for all work-related Clinton emails would turn up many more, even though the department probably archived only a small percentage of all her emails.

Recall the Bloomberg News report that said FBI agents were sorting all of Clinton's deleted emails into the work-related ones and the genuinely personal ones. That suggests there's a significant percentage of work-related ones and not just a few stragglers. Consider that when experts comment on the chances of Clinton being indicted or not, they're only considering the known released Clinton emails. What if the more damning material was in the deleted emails?

Imagine if you were the target of an FBI investigation and you realized after the fact that you had screwed up and discussed highly classified information in unsecure emails. Wouldn't you be tempted to delete the worst emails if you thought you could permanently get rid of them?

In just the week since I wrote that, more Clinton emails have come out that in my opinion indicate thousands of emails were improperly deleted. There hasn't been any good reporting on this yet, but you can see the emails here:

http://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/jw-v-state-6th-production-huma-emails-00684/

http://www.judicialwatch.org/document-archive/jw-v-state-5th-production-huma-emails-00684-3/

If you check the emails in those links to or from Clinton against the State Department database of all of Clinton's released emails, you'll see a majority of them are not in that database. In five cases, the emails are actually replies to emails that ARE in the database. For instance, Huma Abedin sent Clinton an email, which is in the database, and then Clinton sent back a reply (such as "please print&quot , which is not. That is inexplicable. How could only argue that the email to her is work related but her reply back is not? (The State Department database normally has all the emails in a chain.)

Clinton has described in the press the process through which the emails were selected, and a look through those above links show that process wasn't followed. For instance, all her emails to and from Abedin should have been flagged early on as work emails by virtue of the fact they were with Abedin, her deputy chief of staff (unless they were of a personal nature, which you can see from the links above they were not, except maybe in one or two cases).

So yeah, there should be lots of questions here! I would think someone or some people would be in danger of obstuction of justice and destruction of evidence changes, though one might argue just who is responsible for how much of the problem. It would be outrageous if the whole email deletion problem is waved away due to attorney-client privilege. Imagine if you shot someone with a gun and then you asked your friend who is a lawyer to dispose of the gun, and then the lawyer did. Would investigators not be allowed to ask about that due to attorney-client privilege?! That can't possibly be, can it?