The finding, which has not been previously reported, means that Clinton’s emails, including classified ones and ones which were later deleted, likely existed on Google’s U.S.-based servers. The FBI said in the report that it knew this — and of the suspicious explanation for it — but did not alert other intelligence agencies or the public, according to the report.
The FBI says that the suspicious Gmail address was set up by an IT aide, Paul Combetta, who worked for a company that managed Clinton’s server. Combetta is the same IT aide who used BleachBit to permanently erase copies of Clinton’s emails after they were subpoenaed by the House, misled the FBI about it, and was given immunity from prosecution, all while asking for basic computing advice on Reddit.
These two statements sound like hyperventilating, and throw a pall on the entire report - Either the author is operating from ignorance, or is purposefully ginning up suspicions.
On the first statement - I am tangentially familiar with BleachBit, preferring different software, but all software, like-in-kind, are standard procedure and an encouraged exercise in computing...
Deleted files are not really deleted on your machine - they are merely marked for deletion and thereafter hidden from the user by standard directory filtering... A file marked as deleted remains until it may be overwritten by a new incoming saved file, or other computer actions that may overwrite it, like automated caching or defragmenting...
What BleachBit, or others like it do, is to intentionally overwrite those already deleted files by overwriting all 'free space' on the drive... And 'wiping free space' is done all the time, as a responsible industry standard. My own defragmenting operations wipe free space as a matter of course.
That is not nefarious. That is good practice.
As to the second point, it is really not uncommon in IT for one expert to rely on the expertise of another in a different field - I am a service tech and a recovery specialist; and what I know is stuff that a network tech would be totally oblivious to (and quite likely the other way around)... And as good as I am at what I do, I was recently on a tech forum asking questions of graphics techs that I am sure were quite rudimentary to them, with respect to how GPU caches work.
Again, inquiry is not uncommon. Nor is it uncommon for one expert to be asking rather common questions of an expert in another field. computing and computer sciences are very broad fields.
