Why are Hillary’s deleted emails an issue?

I work in IT, specifically as the director of IT for a software development company. I don’t currently operate an Exchange server, but I have in the past and I know a thing or two about emails, and I don’t understand why Hillary Clinton deleting emails is an issue.

Anytime you’ve sent an email, there are at least two copies. The sender has a copy, and the recipient has a copy. Not only that, but there are logs kept of who sent went from where/to where, etc. etc. Everything you do online is being logged and, with enough determination, can probably be traced back to you. There are certain situations where this just isn’t possible, but tracing all these deleted emails is not one of those situations. The software Hillary’s IT used to remove the emails, BleachBit, is not some uber espionage tool that can remove all traces of an email from the entire internet. It’s freeware available to anybody. You can download and run it right now. It may have removed emails from her server, sure, and likely overwritten them with nonsense data if they did it right (surprise, just deleting your files doesn’t actually delete it, you have to take the extra step of overwriting the data before it’s actually unrecoverable). They might have even wiped her logs. But I’m sure if the FBI had reason to believe that there was something more than wedding planning and yoga emails deleted, they’d be able to track down every trace of them. Instead, the FBI cleared her of wrongdoing. The people who have the most faith in law enforcement seem to be the ones who don’t like that the FBI cleared Hillary, but too bad. It happened.

You might think 33,000 emails is a lot. It’s not. I have over 12,000 personal emails I’ve never read and I’ve probably cleaned 20,000 or 30,000 emails out of my personal account before. I’ve also never planned a wedding, attended a yoga class, or have been a politician. I’m assuming Hillary gets a lot more personal emails than I do.

Is Hillary’s use of a private server an issue? Maybe. Again, the FBI cleared her. There was no law against it and her predecessor Colin Powell did the same thing. I don’t think the security of her private email server would be jeopardized as long as she had a competent IT. I do have a feeling that a government email server would be more secure, but by how much I can only guess.

Did emails leak that Hillary either sent or was on the chain of? Yes. Did they leak from her server? No.

Did she need to use BleachBit to remove emails and destroy her phones? Yes, I think those were both prudent moves. Again, she had a lot of emails about wedding planning. How many of them might have included credit card numbers or checking accounts? Addresses and phone numbers of her relatives? And destroying phones makes it much harder to recover data from them. Maybe not impossible, but smashing them with a hammer is the least you can do. Obviously, maybe you and I don’t have to go through these extremes when we upgrade to a new phone, but we also haven’t been in the public eye for 30 years or have held public office.

What I’m getting at is if you think you should vote for a racist, sexist, lying, cheating, ignorant, entitled, muckraking megalomaniac like Trump, it better not be because of some missing emails.