[Travis McGee]

If the server was grabbed from her house right now, would all of her emails be on it in some form?

Could she just mass-delete them and make them unrecoverable?

Or would she have to physically destroy it: smash, burn etc?

[Peter W. Kessler]

Hillary’s private server has been vaporized.

There isn’t a trace of it left.

Take that to the bank.

[Joe Brower]

I agree with Peter -- it's already been crushed to powder, no doubt. Which would do the trick. Utter and complete physical destruction always does.

If that is not so, as we are well aware, 'deleting' files usually does no such thing, but instead leaves the data on the disk but simply marks the VTOC as available.

There are utilities that will actually write zeroes to all data sectors, and some of these can do it in a pre-programmed fashion invoked by a specific keystroke. But even those may take time to run, based on the number of sectors that need to be wiped. So a SWAT team busting in the door and immediately pulling the plug on the CPU would potentially leave some data recoverable.

But again, I'm sure this hardware, and its data, have already been reduced to dust.