In a transparency nightmare, Hillary Clinton admitted on Tuesday that she deleted more than 30,000 "personal" emails from her private email before turning the rest over to the State Department for record keeping, but cybersecurity experts believe that those deleted emails could still be recovered if Clinton agrees to have her private server examined.
"Email is really, really hard to get rid of," Marcus Rogers, the director of Purdue University's cyber forensics and security program, told The Hill.
"So if they've got the server and it hasn't been wiped, then the probability of recovering the emails is extremely high," Rogers said.
The director of the University of Maryland's Cybersecurity Center agreed, saying, "A lot of times if you don't delete things properly, you can still recover them potentially after the fact."
"In general we know from the corporate world that there's a lot of instances of companies being hacked and the companies not knowing or not identifying it until well after the event," Katz told The Hill. "It's certainly possible that the server was hacked and they just don't know about it yet."
Transparency advocates are upset that Clinton and her team, rather than an impartial third party, unilaterally decided which of her 60,000 emails to keep for governmental storage, and which to delete. The emails were sent through a personal email account and private home-based server, with a domain hosted by a consumer grade company that had been hacked in 2010.
Many speculate that the former secretary of state may be hiding information that could embarrass her and disrupt her likely bid for the White House.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House panel investigating the Benghazi terrorist attack, said that Clinton should hand her email server over to an independent party for investigation.
"One thing that's clear is that we don't get to grade our own papers in life. We don't get to call penalties on ourselves. She doesn't get to determine what is a public record and what is a personal record. Someone else needs to do that," Gowdy said.
During a Wednesday MSNBC interview, Gowdy said that we "shouldn't have to compel it."
"I think it's eminently reasonable to ask someone to turn over this server to an independent, neutral third party. Not to the House of Representatives, turn it over to a retired judge, an archivist, an inspector general, so that we can have some assurance that the 'we' that separated the public from the private did a good job."
