Hillary Clinton may have deleted all of the emails she deemed personal from the private email server she used during her days as Secretary of State, but those messages still might be recoverable, according to one report.
Politico spoke with computer forensics experts who said Clinton's messages might still be floating around — albeit in pieces — on the server, her computer, and her Blackberry.
The manner in which the emails were deleted matters a great deal, experts told Politico. But if the trashed emails were not overwritten by other deleted messages, they could still exist.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi, led by Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., has
asked Clinton to testify by May 1 as it investigates the events surrounding the 2012 attack on the U.S. Embassy in Libya that left four Americans dead, including the ambassador.
Many questions remain about what happened in Benghazi, including the United States' immediate response to the attack. Congressional investigators are trying to determine if any of the answers lie in Clinton's mountain of more than 30,000 deleted emails.
The Politico story details the process by which emails are typically deleted, and how they might still be available for recovery depending on how much traffic is on the server.
The House Benghazi committee asked Clinton to turn over the server for review, but she declined. Now the committee wants Clinton to answer its questions sometime in April.
The emails,
which were deleted between October and December 2014, could still be recovered, but there's also a chance they are gone forever from the server.
"Obviously Clinton has someone with technical capability to run a mail server for her," computer forensics expert Hal Pomeranz told Politico. "Whether that person is actively capable of interfering with an investigation, I don't know. That's another technological step up."
At any rate, Politico notes that copies of Clinton's emails are most likely sitting on the servers tied to people's emails she corresponded with.
"It's an obvious point, but you can't delete email," former federal prosecutor Mark Rasch told Politico. "By definition, I have sent my emails to or received them from someone else, which means … someone else has a copy.
"Deleting emails is really not an effective way to conceal what you're doing."
Clinton has been under fire regarding her use of a private email address linked to a private email server that was located at her Chappaqua, N.Y. home. She turned over 30,000 emails from the server to the State Department to preserve them as public record, and said the remaining 32,000 or so messages were private and they were deleted.
Clinton said her reason for using a private email address was because she wanted to carry one device — in this case a Blackberry — for all of her email, both personal and professional. It was revealed Tuesday, however, that
Clinton also used an iPad
to send and receive email.
Clinton is mulling a presidential run and could announce her candidacy in April.