AE, I’m going to assume that you’re arguing in good faith and expound on the above point for you. My professional title is eDiscovery analyst. I’m the guy that collects, sorts, searches, and otherwise handles any electronic evidence in litigation. I’ve personally handled hundreds of government investigations.
In litigation, during the discovery phase, each side first goes through it’s own documents to determine what is relevant to the litigation and what’s non-relevant. Relevant documents are then examined for privilege. Once all that is done, we send the responsive, non-privileged documents to the other side for review. There are significant sanctions for messing with this process by doing things like intentionally designating responsive documents as non-responsive. There are further checks against designating non-privileged records as privileged.
What happened is that Clinton’s legal team went through the documents, designated what is responsive, then asked for permission to delete the non-responsive documents. That permission was granted. They’re not government documents, especially since they weren’t sent using a government account or equipment. Nothing untoward happened as far as I’m aware.
That said, I think deleting the data was a bad idea. Personally, I would have advised that it be archived in case the discovery request changes and additional information is needed. However, I don’t know what kind of sensitive personal information might have been in the data that the legal team opted instead to remove it entirely.
Going further, we have A LOT of tools to piece electronic data together. We can import all that email into a database and have it examine conversations and look for missing pieces. We can determine that we received a bunch of emails from Person B that Person A should have also had and didn’t give us. There are A LOT of ways to figure out if someone is missing email that they should have had. In order for Clinton to successfully hide things, she would have to remove every piece of every conversation from every recipient. With the amount of messages and emails flying around, that’s pretty much a fool’s errand. It’s like trying to execute the perfect murder but you inevitably leave forensic evidence behind.
The 33k emails, while I find it slightly off-putting that they were deleted, there is no overt indication that anything untoward happened.