Connecticut firm backed up Clinton’s server, might still have personal emails
Clinton hired Datto Inc. to provide a private cloud backup – a virtual server Some of Clinton’s emails apparently migrated to the firm’s off-site server, as well
Did Clinton aides order email storage reduced as State Department sought records?
By Greg Gordon
McClatchy
October 6, 2015
WASHINGTON
Hillary Clinton hired a Connecticut company to back up her emails, and due to a technical glitch some may still reside on one of the firm’s “cloud” storage sites, a Republican Senate committee chairman revealed.
The disclosures, in a letter Monday from Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, heighten the possibility that some of Clinton’s more than 31,000 personal emails may still be recovered. She said last March that she deleted them all upon turning over her official emails to the State Department in December 2014.
Congressional committees have voiced skepticism as to whether the 30,940 emails that the Democratic presidential candidate handed over represented all of her official emails. The FBI is separately investigating whether Clinton’s arrangement put classified information at risk.
His letter to the chief executive of Datto Inc. of Norwalk, Conn., offers the first public confirmation that Clinton or her aides arranged for a backup of her email server after leaving office.
The letter also recounts a series of events that led an employee of Colorado-based Platte River Networks to air suspicions in an email as to whether “this whole thing really is covering up some shaddy shit,” according to an excerpt of an email cited by Johnson, who is chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
On May 31, 2013, four months after Clinton left office, the Clinton Executive Service Corp., which oversaw her email server contracts, hired Platte River to maintain her account. Its New Jersey-based server replaced the server in the basement of her New York home that handled her emails as secretary of state.
At the same time, Platte River retained Datto to set up a virtual backup server that could provide immediate recovery if the primary server failed, Johnson said in his letter. 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 off-site “secure cloud.”
The Clinton firm chose the private cloud virtual server for Platte River to manage, Johnson wrote.
However, documents obtained by the committee show “confusion” among Platte River employees when they realized that data from Clinton’s server “was potentially being sent to Datto’s off-site location,” Johnson wrote.
Several weeks ago, Platte River employees discovered that her private server was syncing with an off-site Datto server, he said.
When Datto acknowledged the issue via email, a Platte River employee replied: “this is a problem.”
Johnson said that means that “Datto apparently possessed a backup of the server’s contents since June 2013.”
Upon that discovery, Platte River “directed Datto to not delete the saved data and worked with Datto to find a way to move the saved information . . . back to Secretary Clinton’s private server.”
Datto and Platte River employees also discussed whether to save the data on a flash drive, send it to Platte River and “then wipe (the data) from the cloud.”
“Despite these communications, it is unclear whether or not this course of action was followed,” Johnson wrote. “Additionally, questions still remain as to whether Datto actually transferred the data from its off-site datacenter to the on-site server, what data was backed up, and whether Datto wiped the data after it was transferred.”
To “wipe” data from a server, experts say, requires overwriting it with encrypted data several times or taking similar steps.
The letter also noted that Platte River employees were directed to reduce the amount of email data being stored with each backup. Late this summer, Johnson wrote, a Platte River employee took note of this change and inquired whether the company could search its archives for an email from Clinton Executive Service Corp. directing such a reduction in October or November 2014 and then again around February, advising Platte River to save only emails sent during the most recent 30 days.
Those reductions would have occurred after the State Department requested that Clinton turn over her emails.
It is unclear why Secretary Clinton’s representatives apparently directed (Platte River) to reduce the backup time period of her emails around the same time period or in the months following the State Department’s request.
Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, in letter to Datto
It was here that the Platte River employee voiced suspicions about a cover-up and sought to protect the company. “If we have it in writing that they told us to cut the backups,” the employee wrote, “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,” according to an email cited by Johnson.
In the letter to Austin McChord, Datto’s chief executive officer, Johnson asked the firm to produce copies of all communications it had relating to Clinton’s server, including Platte River and the Clinton firm.” He also asked whether Datto and its employees were authorized to store and view classified information.
In an ongoing review of Clinton’s official emails, the State Department and intelligence agencies have found over 400 containing classified information, including at least two declared “Top Secret,” the most sensitive national security data. Clinton has said none of the emails were marked classified during her tenure.
A spokesman for Clinton’s campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Datto, based in Norwalk, also provided no immediate comment.
