Opinion
For months now, we’ve
been told that Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 missing emails were permanently erased
and destroyed beyond recovery. But newly released FBI notes strongly suggest
they still exist in several locations — and they could be recovered, if only
someone would impanel a grand jury and seize them.
In a May interview
with FBI agents, an executive with the Denver contractor that maintained
Clinton’s private server revealed that an underling didn’t bleach-clean all her
subpoenaed emails, just ones he stored in a data file he used to transfer the
emails from the server to Clinton’s aides, who in turn sorted them for delivery
to Congress.
The Platte River
Networks executive, whose name was redacted from the interview report, said PRN
tech Paul Combetta “created a ‘vehicle’ to transfer email files from the live
mailboxes of [Clinton Executive Services Corp.] email accounts [and] then later
used BleachBit software to shred the ‘vehicle,’ but the email content still
existed in the live email accounts.”
Unless one of
Clinton’s aides had the capability to log in to the PRN server as an
administrator and remove a mailbox, her archived mailboxes more than likely
still reside somewhere in that system. And they may also materialize on an
internal “shared drive” that PRN created to control access to the Clinton email
accounts among PRN employees. PRN has been under FBI order to preserve all
emails and other evidence since the start of its investigation last year.
Clinton’s missing
“personal” emails may also be captured on a Google server. According to FBI
notes, Combetta “transferred all of the Clinton email content to a personal
Google email address he created.” Only the FBI never subpoenaed Google to find
out.
The FBI documents
also reveal that Hillary’s server was mirrored on a cloud server in
Pennsylvania maintained by Datto Inc., a tech firm that performs cloud-to-cloud
data protection.
When PRN contracted
with Datto, it requested that Hillary’s server be backed up locally and
privately. But the techs forgot to order the private node, and they sent the
server backup data “remotely to Datto’s secure cloud and not to a local private
node.” The FBI never subpoenaed Datto’s server, either.
Then there’s the
laptop Combetta loaded with the Clinton email archive and allegedly shipped
back to a Clinton aide in Washington, who claims it got “lost” in the mail. Not
so fast: The latest FBI document dump includes a series of interviews with an
unidentified former “special assistant” to Clinton at the State Department who
said the elusive Apple MacBook laptop was actually “shipped to the Clinton
Foundation in New York City.”
But in a June
follow-up interview, FBI agents inexplicably left it up to this critical
witness to “inquire about the shipment” with the foundation’s mailroom manager,
who works in Rockefeller Center. The FBI still does not have the laptop in its
possession.
It turns out that
investigators also know the whereabouts of the original Apple server Clinton
used in her first two months in office. Recovering that equipment is critical
because it contains a mass of unseen emails from Jan. 21, 2009, to March 18,
2009 — a critical period in Clinton’s tenure at State. Witnesses say the
equipment was not discarded, as first believed, but “repurposed” as a “work
station” used by staff in Clinton’s Chappaqua residence.
Yet the FBI says it
“was unable to obtain the original Apple server for a forensic review.” Instead
of seizing it, the agency has taken Clinton’s aides’ and lawyers’ word that the
server’s bereft of relevant emails.
In fact, the agency confesses on Page 27 of
its 47-page investigative case summary that it failed to recover other
equipment and data as well: “The FBI’s inability to recover all server
equipment and the lack of complete server log data for the relevant time period
limited the FBI’s forensic analysis of the server systems. As a result, FBI
cyber analysis relied, in large part, on witness statements.”
Congressional
investigators say FBI Director James Comey in his year-long “investigation”
didn’t even bother to send agents to search Clinton’s homes in Chappaqua or
Washington, DC. Nor did he dispatch them to the offices of the Clinton
Foundation or Clinton Executive Services Corp. in New York City.
“The Clinton
residences and other locations should have been treated like any other criminal
investigation — with federal grand jury subpoenas or search warrants issued by
judges and served in the middle of the night,” said veteran FBI special agent
Michael M. Biasello, who worked criminal cases out of New York and other field
offices for 27 years.
“Never — I repeat,
never — in my career have I or any FBI agent known to me investigated a
criminal case without the use of a federal grand jury, grand jury subpoenas or
search warrants,” he said. “It’s disgraceful they weren’t used in this case.”
The most damning
evidence against Clinton may never have been actually destroyed. It was simply
left untouched by the FBI.
Paul Sperry, a former
DC bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily and Hoover Institution media fellow,
is author of “Infiltration.” Sperry@SperryFiles.com
