In the weeks following the publication of a 2015 New York Times story that unveiled Hillary Clinton's use of a private email setup, one of her aides began deleting emails from the server she used to conduct official state department business.
According to FBI documents made public Friday, the March 2, 2015 article set off a firestorm of activity in the Clinton camp.
Clinton aide Cheryl Mills contacted Platte River Networks, a Denver-based IT firm that was in possession of Clinton's server, and requested an inventory of all equipment related to the email server originally set up by another Clinton aide, Bryan Pagliano.
Another aide, whose name is redacted in the FBI documents, said he panicked and began deleting files.
"In a follow-up interview on May 3, 2016, [name redacted] indicated he believed he had an 'oh s**t' moment and sometime between March 25-31, 2015 deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported .PST files he had created on the server system containing Clinton's e-mails," the report reads.
"Investigation found evidence of these deletions and determined the Datto backups of the PRN Server were also manually deleted during this timeframe."
Both Mills and Clinton told the FBI they were not aware of the unnamed aide's actions in deleting the emails.
The FBI also discovered that there were several unsuccessful attempts to access Clinton's email account and her iCloud account that contained her email content after the Times story was published.