to compliance to 'discovery' process during a lawsuit over an alleged denial of due process in a tenure process at a university. The requests were limited by specific criteria of interest. People who had served on relevant university governance committees were directed by university council to submit documents that met the criteria. I always wondered how actual compliance could be demonstrated without make everything available for perusal.
I suspect that Clinton did the same with material her personal server with regard to Judicial Watches FOI, providing information that was limited to the details of the request. Then realizing that device which included various email accounts was about to become subject to right-wing fishing operations she went into 'risk management' mode.
The use of personal vs government computer certainly made a mess of things, but I think people are free to destroy there own property. You don't have to save emails in the same way that you must save tax records. What remains subject to doubt is how to verify that compliance to FOI requests was complete. But I think that's always a question. In this particular circumstance, because questions of proper classified information handling emerged, the private emails appear to be another rock under which items of interest might be found. That makes the destruction of the private emails look suspicious. If the FBI or other agencies have recovered the private emails, addressing suspicions might be possible. But currently what we know is some people have suspicions. But then, they often do.
With respect to what's saved as 'federal documents' for archiving, that really does appear to be up to the different government agencies with their agency heads as the final arbiter of rules for that agency. Clinton as sos was the head of an agency.
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