FBI officials have recovered copies of the private emails Hillary Clinton deleted off her server, raising new questions for the Democratic presidential candidate about how she handled the transfer of official records to the government.
The former secretary of state said she turned over all work-related emails at the end of last year and deleted the rest, which she deemed personal. Of the roughly 60,000 emails on her server, Clinton said half were of a personal nature and therefore not subject to federal records laws.
Platte River Networks, the technology company that has managed Clinton’s server since 2013, said the server was unlikely to contain any useful data after it handed the device over to FBI investigators in August.
But computer experts with the law enforcement agency were able to pull copies of the deleted emails off the server with relative ease, according to a report by the New York Times.
Although the number of personal emails recovered was not immediately clear, the report said FBI investigators could access deleted emails because Clinton’s aides may have only made a cursory attempt to purge the records.
David Kendall, Clinton’s attorney, told Congress earlier this year that a setting on the server was adjusted so only messages sent in the past 60 days would be retained after Clinton’s staff had selected which messages would be handed to the State Department in response to its records request, according to the report.
Clinton faces renewed scrutiny of her email arrangement in the wake of reports that indicate she and the State Department gave conflicting accounts of how the agency ultimately obtained copies of her emails.
