The FBI believes that it may be able to recover some information from Hillary Clinton’s private server despite the former secretary of state’s previous attempt to wipe the hardware clean.
The FBI “will try to figure what’s there, how it got there and who put it there,” a source familiar with the investigation into the server told NBC News.
The agency took control of the device last week after it was revealed that the Intelligence Community inspector general had determined that two emails that traversed it contained “top secret” information.
Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, also handed over a thumb drive that contained the emails from the personal email account Clinton used as secretary of state. The State Department had allowed Kendall to store the thumb drive in a safe in his Washington D.C. law office. But after the highly classified information was discovered, the FBI sought control of the device.
If the FBI is able to recover information from Clinton’s server, it will occur despite her efforts to delete all data from it. Kendall informed the House Select Committee on Benghazi in March that the hardware had been scrubbed of all data. It is unclear why that step was taken. Many have speculated that the action was taken in order to conceal Clinton’s emails from congressional investigators and the general public.
Other details of the server — including whether there was a backup — have been difficult to untangle.
Clinton housed the old server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y. home when she was secretary of state. But after she left office she hired Denver-based Platte River Networks to manage her email setup. The company moved the server from New York to a data center in New Jersey. An attorney for Platte River has told reporters, including The Daily Caller, that information from the server was transferred in June 2013. (RELATED: Exclusive: Hillary’s IT Contractor Did Not Have Proper Security Clearance)
As The Daily Caller News Foundation found, Platte River is not cleared by the federal government to handle classified materials.