The Denver-based IT company hired by Hillary Clinton to manage her private email network is turning over a second device to the FBI this week, a company spokesman tells The Daily Caller.
Platte River Networks has already given the FBI the server Clinton maintained as secretary of state. Now, the small IT firm will hand over a separate device manufactured by a Connecticut-based company called Datto Inc.
“The data device is a simple device that sat next to the server,” Platte River spokesman Andy Boian told TheDC in a phone interview.
Platte River, which was contracted to work on Clinton’s email account in May 2013 and hired Datto shortly after, used a Datto SIRIS S2000 to provide a cloud-based virtual backup of Clinton’s physical server, which it housed in a New Jersey data center. (RELATED: Hillary Clinton’s Server Was In New Jersey This Whole Time)
The FBI seized Clinton’s personal server in August, after it was revealed that the Intelligence Community inspector general discovered at least two “top secret” emails had traversed Clinton’s homebrew email network while she was in office.
Boian said that the Datto device could be handed over as early as Wednesday and that the FBI requested it earlier this week.
He also said that the company asked Clinton’s team to approve the hand-over of the second piece of hardware and that they complied.
“At every turn, our client has complied with what has been asked, and so have we,” Boian said.
The second handover raises the question of why, if it was so important to Clinton’s email configuration, it wasn’t turned over sooner.
“We were asked by the FBI to turn over the server, so we complied with the request,” Boian said. “That’s all that was asked for.”
Datto itself has become ensnared in the ever-growing Clinton email scandal. On Monday, Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee chairman Ron Johnson sent a letter to the company’s CEO, Austin McChord, asking for communications between company employees and both Platte River and Clinton Executive Services Corp., a shell company that handled Clinton’s email network contracts.
Johnson published snippets of emails from Platte River employees who expressed concern that Clinton Executive Services Corp. was asking it to cover-up “shaddy [sic] shit.”
According to the emails, the Platte River employee questioned why Clinton Executive Services Corp. made two requests, the first was last October or November, and the second in February, to reduce how much data would be stored in each backup of Clinton’s server. (RELATED: Hillary Clinton Emails Have A FIVE-Month Gap)
“Any chance you found an old email with their directive to cut the backup back in Oct-Feb. I know they had you cut it once in Oct-Nov, then again to 30days [sic] in Feb-ish. If we had that email, we are golden,” the employee wrote on Aug. 19, just days after Platte River’s involvement in the Clinton server contract was first reported.
“Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shaddy [sic] shit,” the employee continued.
“I just think if we have it in writing that they told us to cut the backups, and that we can go public with our statement saying we have had backups since day one, then we were told to trim to 30days [sic], it would make us look a WHOLE LOT better.”
Asked about those emails, Boian said he was “unable to speak to what that email was referring to.”
“I don’t know the author of that email. I don’t know what they were referring to specifically, so I can’t confirm if that’s what they were saying,” he said. (RELATED: Employees At Hillary’s IT Company Worried They Were Being Asked To Cover Up ‘Shady Sh*t’)
Boian also described the utility of the Datto device, and suggested that it is unlikely that the FBI will retrieve Clinton’s emails from it.
“The Datto device itself takes a daily snapshot of the server in a rolling 30 day deletion,” Boian said. “Every 30 days, in a rolling 30 days, that data gets deleted in the last 30 days of emails. It deletes the oldest first, and continues to roll every 30 days.”
It is unclear, however, how much data, if any, the FBI can retrieve from Clinton’s initial server, which she has said was first used by her husband, former President Bill Clinton. Bloomberg News has previously reported that the FBI was able to recover some data from the server. (RELATED: Hillary’s IT Company Says Email Server Was Not ‘Wiped’ Clean)
If that server — or Clinton’s Datto cloud backup — do provide records of her emails, that will allow investigators to determine if Clinton was truthful when she said that she turned all of her work-related emails over to the State Department.
In his letter to McChord, Johnson questioned the timing of Clinton’s decision to ask Platte River to cut how much data would be stored with each backup.
“It is unclear why Secretary Clinton’s representatives apparently directed [Platte River Networks] to reduce the backup time period of her emails around the same time period or in the months following the State Department’s request,” Johnson wrote.
The State Department formally requested that Clinton hand over all of her work-related emails on Oct. 28, 2014. She did so in December. Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal email account and the private server were first revealed in early March, just after the Clinton Enterprise Services Corp. allegedly made its second request for a data draw-down.
The hand-over of the Datto device comes as the FBI has ramped up its seizure of other equipment and data involved in Clinton’s email fiasco.
According to The Washington Post, Datto plans to provide data from its backups of Clinton’s server to the FBI after investigators asked for it.
“Datto is working with the FBI to provide data in conjunction with its investigation,” Datto’s general counsel, Michael Fass, told The Post.
According to the paper, Datto will give the FBI a piece of hardware called a “node.” According to a Datto official, the node, which was housed in Pennsylvania, allowed the company to store data from Clinton’s server on its cloud.
And according to the Washington Free Beacon, the FBI recently seized four servers housed at State Department headquarters. Analysts are trying to determine how classified information was sent to Clinton’s server.
