Allahpundit reported last night that the feds have the emails, but now they apparently have – or will shortly have – the server. Clinton’s team of lawyers wants everyone to know that this is all one big misunderstanding and this move of ultimate transparency will doubtless clear up the questions that all of you suspicious folks have been raising. And “if there are more questions” they will address them as well. (Washington Post)

Hillary Rodham Clinton’s attorney has agreed to provide the FBI with the private server that housed her e-mail during her four years as secretary of state, Clinton’s presidential campaign said Tuesday. Her attorney also has agreed to give agents a thumb drive containing copies of thousands of e-mails that Clinton had previously turned over to the State Department… Nick Merrill, a Clinton spokesman, said Tuesday night that Clinton is cooperating with the FBI probe. He declined to say whether the FBI ordered that she turn over the devices and when her attorney, David Kendall, had done so.

If Clinton’s spokesman is declining to say whether or not the FBI ordered the delivery you can bet that’s what happened. If she had just decided to do it in the name of transparency we’d already have seen her out in front of a camera crowing about how she was going above and beyond the call of duty to satisfy the needs of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy. Of course, given how much deference is shown to Clinton at every level, it may have been more of a case of, “would you like the chance to turn this over voluntarily so we don’t have to bring in a warrant?”

It’s sounding more and more like the feds are simply unable to ignore the growing avalanche of evidence that everything Hillary Clinton said about her email situation from the beginning was a flat out lie. (USA Today)

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, told CBS News Tuesday that two of the emails Clinton gave to the State Department were designated as “Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information,” one of the government’s most sensitive classifications. Those two emails were among four that the inspector general for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence confirmed as containing classified material, out of the 30,000 emails Clinton handed over to the State Department for review. The inspector general said Clinton had “potentially hundreds of classified emails” among those she handed over.

I don’t want to sound like too much of a Debby Downer at this point, but I’ll borrow a rather famous quote from the former Secretary of State herself. What difference at this point does it make? That server was sitting safely in the depths of Mordor for more than four years, and even after it became obvious that it was time to start hiding the bodies, there have been additional months on end for a set of geeks to be working it over like a Gitmo detainee. She admitted to “erasing” tens of thousands of emails, but simply hitting the delete key was obviously not all that happened. As Professor Jacobson at Legal Insurrection points out, there was a whole lot of scrubbing going on. And yet, he sees possible signs of hope.

The server has been wiped clean, according to Hillary’s lawyers. But that may not be the last word on it. The feds are extremely good at overcoming all but the most sophisticated wipes. The inspection also may reveal the timeline when the document destruction took place.

I suppose that’s possible. What’s to be found – assuming a vigorous search is going to take place and the results are ever made public – could run the range from zip to… something. Perhaps fragments of the deleted emails still exist, assuming that drives have not been entirely replaced with the originals destroyed. Even if you can’t reconstruct the original data, can you establish a timeline for when things were erased and how vigorous the cleaning process was? I’m not deep enough in the geek weeds to say. But I still maintain that so much time has gone by that the results will be suspect at best. This is like an episode of The Sopranos where the cops show up at Tony’s sister’s house to look for the body after the boys have had six months to soak the bathroom down in Clorox and drop the trash bags in the ocean.