Platte River Networks, the Denver-based cybersecurity firm Hillary Clinton hired in 2013 to maintain her old email server, says it is “highly likely” a full backup of the device was made and that the thousands of emails Clinton deleted may still exist, ABC News is reporting.
On Wednesday, Platte River gave the FBI the server Clinton used as secretary of state. The Democratic presidential candidate had stated numerous times prior to that that she would not relinquish control of the server to a third party.
But the FBI became interested in the hardware after the revelation that the Intelligent Community inspector general had determined that two emails that traversed the server contained “top secret” information. While Clinton is not believed to have sent the emails in question, the finding undermines her claims at the onset of the email scandal in March that no classified information ever landed on her server.
Platte River has said that it is cooperating with the FBI and that it is not the target of any investigation.
The company did not respond to requests for additional comment Sunday.
The details about how Clinton’s server was handled and how the data from it was transferred have remained unclear.
In a March 27 letter to the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, wrote that he “confirmed with the Secretary’s IT support that no e-mails from hdr22@clintonemail.com…reside on the server or any back-up systems associated with the server.”
Earlier this week, Barbara Wells, an attorney for Platte River, told reporters, including The Daily Caller, that the server was rendered blank after data was transferred from it in June 2013. Wells told Bloomberg News that the information from Clinton’s old server was migrated to a new server that still exists.
She did not elaborate further.
Clinton hired Platte River to manage her email set-up after she left the State Department in Feb. 2013. Prior to that, the server resided in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y. home. It was managed by an IT worker hired by the State Department from Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.
It is still not clear why exactly Clinton hired Platte River. Many have speculated that it was a response to the March 2013 hack of the email account of Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton friend.
Clinton’s email address — hdr22@clintonemail.com — was revealed in that hack, though it was unknown at the time that that was the account she also used to conduct State Department business. Clinton has asserted that her server was secure and was never hacked.
Platte River’s involvement in handling Clinton’s server poses other problems, as The Daily Caller News Foundation exclusively learned Friday.
A spokesman for the Defense Security Service, an arm of the Defense Department, told TheDCNF that Platte River “is not cleared” to have access to classified material. Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson, who chairs the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, said that the finding “raises serious questions” about how secure Clinton’s server was. (RELATED: Exclusive: Hillary’s IT Contractor Did Not Have Proper Security Clearance)
Johnson sent a letter of inquiry to Platte River earlier this week to determine what security measures it took to secure the server.
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