FBI investigators are expanding their probe to a Connecticut-based firm that may have copies of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
David Kendall, her private attorney, agreed on Friday to allow Datto, Inc., the Norwalk, Conn., firm, to hand over emails that were stored on a backup server in its possession, according to a report by McClatchy.
Platte River Networks, the technology company primarily responsible for managing Clinton’s email network since 2013, purchased a Datto server in May of that year and moved Clinton’s emails from the basement of her Chappaqua home to a data center in New Jersey, according to a letter by Sen. Ron Johnson that was obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Johnson, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, asked Datto CEO Austin McChord to share with the committee any correspondence with Clinton’s staff or Platte River employees regarding the management of the server.
Excerpts of emails provided to Johnson by Platte River indicate employees of the technology firm have been troubled by recent scrutiny of their involvement with the controversy.
Platte River employees searched their archives in August for an email from Clinton’s staff directing them to shed email data from her server beginning in the fall of last year.
“If we had that email, we are golden,” one employee wrote, apparently worried about the consequences of having deleted emails each time the company backed them up.
“Wondering how we can sneak an email in now after the fact asking them when they told us to cut the backups and have them confirm it for our records. Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shaddy s—-,” the employee wrote in the email.
“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 30 days, it would make us look a WHOLE LOT better,” the employee added, referring to an apparent order earlier this year from Clinton’s team that only emails sent or received in the past 30 days be retained.
Although Platte River’s records indicate Clinton had specifically requested that her emails stay off Datto’s “cloud” storage network, the technology firm realized in August that Clinton’s server was somehow connecting with the off-site cloud. Platte River staff quickly reached out to Datto to inquire about the connection and discovered Datto had apparently backed up the server since June 2013 without being asked.
The technology firm instructed Datto not to erase the emails in its cloud, according to Johnson’s letter.
The expansion of the FBI probe to include data in Datto’s control could complicate an already intricate investigation. Platte River has cooperated with the law enforcement agency and congressional investigators.
A Datto representative told McClatchy the company is providing data to the FBI after receiving the “consent of our client.”
Clinton’s critics have accused the former secretary of state of deleting official emails that could have raised uncomfortable questions for her presidential campaign. Clinton said she deleted roughly 30,000 emails last year after deciding they contained personal information.
But Republicans argue Clinton should not have been permitted to make that call. Some have expressed optimism that the FBI can recover deleted copies of her personal emails, and the discovery of the trove of data in Datto’s network could bring them one step closer to accessing the records Clinton did not turn over to the government.
