I’m an IT guy in the DC market. It is a totally safe assumption that everything that went through that server was eaten for breakfast by every intelligence agency on the planet. If I worked for some foreign government, that would be red meat to me.
The rule here is, if you do Fedgov stuff, you stay within their rules, no exceptions for any reason. If it gets compromised, it’s on somebody else.
Hillary. Laws are for the little people.
I read the book Washington Station by a former Soviet intelligence guy who posed as a journalist. One of the biggest coups they pulled off during that time was getting in touch with the workers at a cleaning company who did key government installations such as the Defense Intelligence Agency, CIA and others. They would drive up to a curb late at night and exchange cold hard cash for bags of trash. In some cases, the workers (mostly illegal immigrants) would even bring the trash to them.
According to the author, the Soviet Union finally figured out they were screwed when they discovered defense drawings in the trash with technologies that they were years away from getting.
They pulled out all stops to defeat Reagan for re-election in 1984 and Bush in 1988. They even got help from the DC Press in some cases to coordinate those efforts.