On the question of whether Hillary’s deleted e-mails are recoverable, there are a range of views, many suggesting that some or all of the e-mails (or parts thereof) should be recoverable. I’ve been told that the only surefire way of making a hard drive unrecoverable is to bring it to the crematorium. Whether that is entirely correct or not, I leave to the forensic data experts to debate. But there is every reason for the Benghazi Select Committee to continue to seek Mrs. Clinton’s computer equipment, and Committee Chair Trey Gowdy today wrote another polite response to Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers asking “pretty please.” If he continues to get stiff-armed, he will undoubtedly take the next step and subpoena the server, either through the Committee or the whole house. And then “please” will no longer be part of the equation.

Another read of the letter from David Kendall, Mrs. Clinton’s lawyer, to Chairman Gowdy last week provides further evidence of the evasive purpose of Mrs. Clinton’s deletion. Mr. Kendall explains that, after lawyers conducted the review of her records to determine which were official and which were personal, “the Secretary chose not to keep her non-record personal emails and asked that her account (which was no longer in active use) be set to retain only the most recent 60 days of e-mail [emphasis added].” So in the same breath that Mr. Kendall confirms that the [email protected] account is no longer used by Mrs. Clinton (perhaps understandable given the spam that account must now be getting), he explains that an auto-delete function on the account was set to retain only the most recent 60 days of email. As a result of that auto-delete, Kendall explained, there are no emails left to retrieve.

Now why on God’s green earth would Mrs. Clinton have ordered that a rolling auto-delete be set for an account that is “no longer in active use”? The answer, of course, is that she simply wanted to overwrite all of the emails (without having to actually hit the delete key) and conceal them from the Committee and the public. No other reason could exist. If Mrs. Clinton had nothing to hide, a much more conservative route would have been to save any purportedly “private” emails to assist her later in proving a negative – that she did not delete anything official or responsive to the Committee’s demands. That she didn’t suggests that it was a safer bet to wipe the slate entirely clean. Whether she succeeded or not is what the Benghazi Committee wants to know.