Hillary Clinton's 31,000 emails from her infamous personal server "might not be erased after all," a CNN anchor said Sunday after a Washington Post report that the company that managed it says it has no knowledge if it was truly wiped clean.
"The story is never going to go away for the Clinton campaign if there are more inconsistencies, and this would be another inconsistency if this server company says the server was not wiped at all, that means those emails would be able to be reviewed," CNN reporter Jeff Zeleny said. "So some of them certainly are personal in nature, but we don't know if all of them are."
The company that managed Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private e-mail server said it has "no knowledge of the server being wiped," the strongest indication to date that tens of thousands of e-mails that Clinton has said were deleted could be recovered.
Clinton and her advisers have said for months that she deleted her personal correspondence from her time as secretary of state, creating the impression that 31,000 e-mails were gone forever.
There is a distinction between e-mails’ being deleted and a server being wiped. If e-mails are deleted or moved from a server, they appear to no longer exist on the device. But experts say, depending on the condition of the server, underlying data can remain on the device, and the e-mails can often be restored.
To make the information go away permanently, a server must be wiped — a process that includes overwriting the underlying data with gibberish, possibly several times.
That process, according to Platte River Networks, the Denver-based firm that has managed the system since 2013, apparently did not happen.
Zeleny said this was just another example of the "drip-drip-drip" nature of this controversy for Clinton.
"It will not end here. The Clintons obviously know what is in those emails, because she was obviously writing those emails, so some of them certainly are personal, but we don't know if all of them were personal, and they clearly tried to get rid of the ones that were personal," Zeleny said. "So if the server company has recovered them, who actually will see them? This certainly raises so many more questions here, and it ensures that this will just keep going on and on and on."