Not sure what's on server, Clinton says

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at a town hall meeting, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015, in North Las Vegas, Nev.
Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton speaks at a town hall meeting, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015, in North Las Vegas, Nev.

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. -- Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that she did not know whether her email server, which was turned over to the FBI last week, had been wiped clean of data.

In an exchange with reporters after an event in North Las Vegas, Clinton responded, "What, like with a cloth or something?" when asked whether the server had been wiped. "I don't know how it works at all."

As a reporter pressed Clinton on the matter, an aide ended the question-and-answer session.

As Clinton turned to leave, another reporter shouted a question about whether the email issue will ever go away. Clinton turned back and shrugged.

"Nobody talks to me about it other than you guys," she said.

The private email server Clinton used as secretary of state for four years was turned over to the FBI last week from a data center in New Jersey, where it had been stored since 2013 by a Denver information-technology firm that the Clintons had hired that year to manage their technology needs.

"In order to be as cooperative as possible, we have turned over the server," Clinton told reporters Tuesday. "They can do whatever they want to with the server to figure out what's there and what's not there. That's for the people investigating it to try to figure out."

Republicans have seized on the issue to raise questions about Clinton's trustworthiness as she seeks the Democratic presidential nomination.

Clinton said Tuesday she was "very comfortable that this will eventually get resolved and the American people will have plenty of time to figure it out."

She again insisted Tuesday that she did not send any classified material but also acknowledged she wishes she had not used the private system.

"In retrospect, what was meant to be convenient has turned out to be anything but convenient," she said.

Screeners of 30,000 emails ordered released by a federal judge in May have flagged 305 of those documents for further review by U.S. intelligence agencies, government lawyers said in court papers.

That information was made public Monday in a filing with Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington as government attorneys explained why the screeners have fallen behind the schedule he set for making those messages public under a freedom of information request.

Information about the security of Clinton's computer system, who had access to it and whether outsiders tried to crack its contents is in the purview of a forensic examination.

Clinton's emails show some messages she wrote were censored by the State Department for national security reasons before they were publicly released. The government blacked out those messages under a provision of the Freedom of Information Act intended to protect material that had been deemed and properly classified for purposes of national defense or foreign policy.

What hasn't been released is information that could show how secure her system was, whether someone tried to break in and who else had accounts on her system.

Many details of the server remain unknown, such as whether its data were backed up. The server traced back to an Internet connection at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y.

Just like a home desktop, the computer's data are stored on a hard drive. It's unclear whether the drive that Clinton used was thoroughly erased before the device was turned over to federal agents.

An FBI spokesman declined to comment.

Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner and Rosalind S. Helderman of The Washington Post; by Jack Gillum, Stephen Braun, Ken Thomas and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press; and by Andrew M. Harris of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 08/19/2015

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