2nd Tech Firm Might Have Hillary Emails

Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the committee, first brought the existence of the Datto cloud to light in a letter to its CEO Monday.

25 that the Obama administration recently discovered a chain of 2009 emails between Clinton and former Army Gen. David Petraeus that were not included among the 55,000 pages she had thus far handed over.

Her political enemies question whether Clinton turned over all the emails related to her job as Secretary of State.

Clinton has said multiple times that she used a single, personal email account as secretary of state out of convenience, not to circumvent open records laws – although that was the practical effect of the decision. The server in question was kept in her New York City home. While the server wouldn’t have been “wiped clean”, the source said, any underlying data likely would have been written over and would be hard to recover.

Norwalk-based Datto finds itself entwined in the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s emails, after McClatchy’s Washington bureau reported a few of those emails could still reside on Datto servers that provide data backup.

In one exchange, a Platte River employee working on the Clinton account discusses with a colleague whether there was a written record of a “directive to cut the backup”.

“If we had that email we are golden”, the employee wrote. Numerous employees admitted that they felt unease and serious concern with regard to how they were being directed to manage Clinton’s data backups.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is trying to determine whether classified information was improperly transmitted using Clinton’s private server.

“Despite these communications, it is unclear whether or not this course of action was followed”, Johnson said.

To “wipe” data from a server, experts say, requires overwriting it with encrypted data several times or taking similar steps. It was probably protected to a few degree, because even the most basic commercial online backup systems recognize the danger of hackers intercepting their transmissions, but clearly Datto believes security upgrades were available. The State Department, however, doesn’t seem so sure about that.

The dispute also relates to the likelihood that investigators might be able to retrieve from Datto’s equipment at least a few of the 31,000 e-mails from Clinton’s time as secretary that she deemed personal and has since deleted.

It was here that the Platte River employee voiced suspicions about a cover-up and sought to protect the company. The employee sent off an email that said “this whole thing really is covering up a few shaddy (sic) sh*t”.

Of particular interest to Johnson, according to his letter, is whether Datto was authorized to store classified information and whether the firm has come under cyberattack. Her campaign said she no longer had access to those messages.

Datto did not respond to a request for comment. It’s also worth noting that this information comes to us via a GOP senator a day after Clinton released an ad attacking congressional Republicans. “Furthermore, we asked the IG to incorporate this matter into the review Secretary Kerry requested in March”. Then, under pressure from critics, she said she was sorry people were confused by the practice, later admitting in early September that her use of a private email system had been a mistake.

Clinton’s team dismissed the incidents as nothing more than evidence that “like millions of other Americans, she received spam”.