Hillary Clinton’s technology company tapped a Connecticut-based firm to back up copies of her personal and work-related emails shortly after she left the State Department, creating confusion among the contractors she had already hired to manage her existing server.
In a letter Monday to Datto Inc., the Norwalk, Conn., technology firm that transferred her emails to cloud-based storage, Sen. Ron Johnson revealed employees at the company primarily responsible for managing Clinton’s emails, Platte River Networks, were concerned about getting swept up in what appeared to be “some shady [sic] s—.”
Platte River employees realized several weeks ago that Clinton’s private server was still connecting with an off-site Datto network, prompting “confusion” among the staff, according to a report by McClatchy.
Johnson cited excerpts of internal Platte River emails that suggest employees at the company realized they could face consequences for scrubbing Clinton’s emails, as they had been asked to do.
Through Clinton Executive Service Corp., the private company Clinton evidently set up to manage affairs that included her email network, Clinton asked Platte River to reduce the amount of data it was storing each time it backed up the emails. Staff at the technology firm began this summer to search their archives for a fall 2014 email from Clinton Executive Service Corp. that laid out instructions to delete email data, as well as a February message directing the company to stop storing any emails that were not sent or received in the past 30 days.
“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,” one employee wrote.
If Clinton did indeed ask Platte River to start shedding emails from their system in Oct. or Nov. 2014, as the Johnson letter indicates, then that would mean Clinton requested the purge after she was pressed by the State Department to hand over all of her work-related emails.
The discovery that Clinton’s server was syncing with the Datto network strengthens the possibility that investigators will be able to recover the roughly 30,000 emails Clinton said she deleted last year.
A watchdog group asked a federal court Tuesday to consider all emails housed on the “clintonemail.com” domain as part of an official records system, therefore making them all subject to searches under the Freedom of Information Act.