Federal Bureau of Investigation probe of Clinton e-mail expands to second data company

It’s not clear whether the Federal Bureau of Investigation will be able to recover any of Clinton’s emails from Datto, or even if the data provided to the company includes material from her time as secretary of state, according to The Washington Post.

Platte River Networks, based in Denver, maintained a server for the Clintons in New Jersey. Their existence challenges Clinton’s claim that she has already provided all of her work emails from her tenure as secretary, which are the subject of numerous public records lawsuits.

The investigation would appear to be centering on the email activities of Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, and whether they sent the classified information to Clinton’s private server. Not only did Hillary Clinton’s unsecured and unauthorized e-mail system get used to store and transmit classified information, in a few cases Top Secret/compartmented intelligence, the data may have gotten stored on a backup firm’s “cloud” – unbeknownst to the Clintons.

Datto says it offers two kinds of backup storage: a private cloud virtual server that takes data from a server and converts it into “virtual machines that can be booted instantly”, and an offsite “secure cloud”.

The committee is one of several investigating Clinton’s use of a private email account and server instead of a government account while she was USA secretary of state.

The employee indicates in the email that Clinton’s team asked them to change the back-up duration between October and February, presumably of 2014/2015, though that isn’t explicitly stated in the portion of the email included in Johnson’s letter. Neither Datto nor Platte River would have known of specific classification of information on the server, but Platte River seems to have understood that it was at least sensitive. “Despite these communications, it is unclear whether or not this course of action was followed, ‘ Johnson wrote”. The Republican lawmaker is requesting documents from the company having to do with its work on Clinton’s server.

Judicial Watch, a conservative public interest law firm that is suing to try to get a look at the tens of thousands of emails Mrs. Clinton deemed personal, said getting the letter from the State Department is an important step because it should be a warning to her not to delete anything she has.

This raises new questions about the wisdom of doing government business with private servers, something Hillary Clinton eventually apologized for.

The AP reported last month that Russia-linked hackers sent Clinton emails in 2011 – when she was still secretary of state – loaded with malware that could have exposed her computer if she opened the attachments.

Further, new information shows Clinton may have instructed subordinates to start deleting information two years ago as investigations about her email practices were ramping up and as FOIA requests for her emails started to roll in.