Report: Team Hillary asked Platte River to reduce email data storage

In 2013, Hillary Clinton hired Platte River to manage her private email network. Thereafter, according to a letter written by Sen. Ron Johnson and obtained by the Daily Caller, the Clinton Executive Services Corp. — a Clinton family company — twice instructed Platte River to reduce the amount of email data being stored during each server backup by decreasing the backup time period for email retention.

The change caused the deletion of emails. As I understand it, the server wouldn’t have been “wiped clean,” but data would have been “written over,” making it difficult to recover.

Clinton’s representatives reportedly made the first request in or around October 2014 and the second in or around February 2015. As of October 2014, the State Department had recently asked Clinton to turn over her emails. Thus, it seems inappropriate for Hillary to have requested a reduction in email storage.

Platte River came to believe so. As one employee put it: “Starting to think this whole thing really is covering up some shaddy [sic] sh*t.” The employee added:

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.

This sentiment led to a search of Platte River’s archives for the emails in which Clinton’s representatives had requested the reduced backup. It seems, however, that the request was made by telephone.

In the absence of documentary evidence, it’s possible in theory that Clinton made no such request. In practice, it seems inconceivable that Platte River unilaterally reduced the backups.

The Clintons have a long history of burning a great deal of what they touch. As a friend of mine put it, they are the Tom and Daisy Buchanan of American politics. Ask Susan McDougal. Ask Webb Hubbell. Ask Monica Lewinsky.

Platte River smelled the danger and did not want to become the Clintons’ latest victim.

In his letter, written to the CEO of a Datto, Inc., a company Clinton hired to back up her emails on a cloud storage system, Johnson states:

It is unclear why Secretary Clinton’s representatives apparently directed [Platte River Networks] to reduce the backup time period of her emails around the same time period or in the months following the State Department’s request.

Maybe so, but one can make an educated guess.

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