> In 2014, months prior to public knowledge of the server's existence, Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and two attorneys worked to identify work-related emails on the server to be archived and preserved for the State Department. Upon completion of this task in December 2014, Mills instructed Clinton's computer services provider, Platte River Networks (PRN), to change the server's retention period to 60 days, allowing 31,830 older personal emails to be automatically deleted from the server, as Clinton had decided she no longer needed them. However, the PRN technician assigned for this task failed to carry it out at that time
I guess people of varying political viewpoints would differ on whether Clinton had gotten away with anything. But plenty of other cases in which powerful people did not get away with destroying evidence. Or rather, they had the ability to destroy email evidence and didn't, because they knew they wouldn't get away with it. Gen. David Petraeus [0], for example, and the officials currently under the Mueller probe.
You don’t really need to look very far. The moment you have so many people that you can plausibly chalk the deletion up to miscommunication or automated processes you are basically home free.
Or at least, just get off with a fine, it’s the company doing a wrong after all, and you can’t jail a company.
> The moment you have so many people that you can plausibly chalk the deletion up to miscommunication or automated processes you are basically home free.
Having so many people involved is as much a liability as any kind of benefit. It means more people to testify, and if you are involved in a cover up, more people willing to join in your conspiracy. Bigger companies also likelier have better guidelines regarding automated processes, are you suggesting any deletion by an automated process should be judged as suspect?
Not in all cases. But if it hits something like email records, it becomes a bit silly to think they’re doing it for any reasons other than that there’s stuff in the emails that’s going to hurt them (at some point).
Powerful people seem to get away with this....