USA | Probe of Clinton’s server could find more than just emails

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks during a news conference during a visit to the Iowa State Fair, Saturday

Now that federal investigators have Hillary Rodham Clinton’s homebrew email server, they could examine files on her machine that would be more revelatory than the emails themselves.
Clinton last week handed over to the FBI her private server, which she used to send, receive and store emails during her four years as secretary of state. The bureau is holding the machine in protective custody after the intelligence community’s inspector general raised concerns recently that classified information had traversed the system.
Clinton leads the race for Democratic presidential nomination by wide margin even though questions about her use of the server have since shadowed her campaign. Republicans have seized on the issue to raise questions about Clinton’s trustworthiness.
Clinton again this weekend repeated a carefully constructed defense of her actions, in that she did not send or receive emails marked classified at the time.
But her emails show some messages she wrote were censored by the State Department for national security reasons before they were publicly released. The government blacked-out those messages under a provision of the Freedom of Information Act intended to protect material that had been deemed and properly classified for purposes of national defense or foreign policy.
What hasn’t been released: data that could show how secure her system was, whether someone tried to break in, and who else had accounts on her system. A lawyer for Platte River Networks, a Colorado-based technology services company that began managing the Clinton server in 2013, said the server was provided to the FBI last week.
Indeed, many physical details of the server remain unknown, such as whether its data was backed up. In March, The Associated Press discovered her server traced back to an Internet connection at her home in Chappaqua, New York.
A computer server isn’t a marvel of modern technology. Just like a home desktop, the computer’s data is stored on a hard drive. It’s unclear whether the drive that Clinton used was thoroughly erased before the device was turned over to federal agents.
If it had been, it’s also uncertain whether the FBI could recover the data. Clinton’s lawyer has used a precise term, “wiped,” to describe the deleted emails, but it was not immediately clear whether the server had been wiped. Such a process overwrites deleted content to make it harder or impossible to recover.
An FBI spokesman declined to comment. Jack Gillum and Stephen Braun, Washington, AP