The Guardian

A Clinton Foundation laptop and a thumb drive used to archive Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time as secretary of state are missing, according to FBI notes released on Friday.

The phrase “Clinton could not recall” litters the summary of the FBI’s investigation, which concluded in July that she should not face charges . Amid fierce Republican criticism of the Democratic presidential candidate, the party’s nominee, Donald Trump released a statement which said “Hillary Clinton’s answers to the FBI about her private email server defy belief” and added that he did not “understand how she was able to get away from prosecution”.

The FBI documents describe how Monica Hanley, a former Clinton aide, received assistance in spring 2013 from Justin Cooper, a former aide to Bill Clinton, in creating an archive of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Cooper provided Hanley with an Apple MacBook laptop from the Clinton Foundation – the family organisation currently embroiled in controversy – and talked her through the process of transferring emails from Clinton’s private server to the laptop and a thumb drive.

“Hanley completed this task from her personal residence,” the notes record. The devices were intended to be stored at Clinton’s homes in New York and Washington. However, Hanley “forgot” to provide the archive laptop and thumb drive to Clinton’s staff.

In early 2014, Hanley located the laptop at her home and tried to transfer the email archive to an IT company, apparently without success. It appears the emails were then transferred to an unnamed person’s personal Gmail account and there were problems around Apple software not being compatible with that of Microsoft.

The unnamed person “told the FBI that, after the transfer was complete, he deleted the emails from the archive laptop but did not wipe the laptop. The laptop was then put in the mail, only to go missing. [Redacted] told the FBI that she never received the laptop from [redacted]; however, she advised that Clinton’s staff was moving offices at the time, and it would have been easy for the package to get lost during the transition period.

“Neither Hanley nor [redacted] could identify the current whereabouts of the archive laptop or thumb drive containing the archive, and the FBI does not have either item in its possession.”

Read More