Kind of an odd request, in light of federal records custody laws and regulations that require all federal records and work product to be preserved for many years.
unless of course they relate to ANYTHING that Obama and Clinton did, then their excuse is “we were hacked” OR “we didn’t know, nobody told us we had to keep records.”
I know from insiders in the state government here in CA, which has the same record retention requirement, that once a stage of a project is completed, the word goes out to delete/discard "noncritical and duplicate records and notes". The rationale is that this simplifies document production under a possible discovery order, but there is a lot of wink-wink going on and a lot of non-duplicate material gets shredded. For stuff that is really controversial, they avoid electronic communications since electronic archives and backups are harder to get rid of than paper.
I would be shocked, shocked if the Federal government didn't do the same thing, with the wink-winking getting pretty frantic when something improper or potentially illegal is involved and a prosecutor or Congressional committee might soon be looking into the situation. Shredders undergo a lot of wear and tear ahead of a preservation order.
Yes, especially considering that Clinton nuked all of her emails..