It may be a head fake but if this guy was trying to get the drives back maybe they haven’t been swapped or scrubbed clean after all.
I’m under a rock and haven’t been following it, but even smashed hard drives may have some data recovered. It depends on how much of the disk platters had significant physical/surface/magnetic damage. If for example you can rebuild 75% of the data, much of the rest can be rebuilt using heuristics.