After ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted portions of their Thursday morning newscasts to the FBI taking control of Hillary Clinton’s e-mail server, the picture was far different on Thursday night as ABC, NBC, Telemundo, and Univision moved on from this scandal and neglected to mention it during their 2016 coverage.
As opposed to covering the latest blows in the 2016 presidential campaign, the CBS Evening News found it pertinent to continue keeping their viewers abreast of Clinton’s e-mail scandal in the form of a two-minute-and-one-second segment from congressional correspondent Nancy Cordes.
Cordes explained that Thursday’s developments included news that “[t]he server the FBI picked up was stored not at the Clinton's Chappaqua, New York home as many assumed but at a data center in New Jersey.”
Citing a lawyer for the firm Platte River Networks, Cordes reported “that the server was moved to the New Jersey facility some time after Clinton left the State Department when the Clintons upgraded their system.” She added that the lawyer told CBS News that “the old server is now blank and likely does not contain usable information.”
The CBS reporter then brought in CNet’s Dan Ackerman to provide an analogy as to how information could have been deleted from Clinton’s. server in a way that it could not be recovered:
Almost as if you write something on a chalkboard and then you erase it and then write over it, then erase it, then write over it, then erase it. Eventually, no matter how closely you look, you will never be able to see what the original thing was you wrote.
Cordes also rehashed details that came to light on Tuesday and Wednesday with the intelligence community’s inspector general (I.G.) having found four e-mails from a batch of 40 to have contained classified information with two being “top secret.”
In the ending to her report, Cordes reminded anchor Scott Pelley and viewers that this determination by I.G. came from only a small subset of her e-mails: “Keep in mind, Scott, that determination was based on a review of just one-tenth of one percent of all of Clinton's work-related e-mails.”
Instead of doing their due diligence and covering the swirling controversy surrounding the former secretary of state, ABC’s World News Tonight and NBC Nightly News focused exclusively on the 2016 presidential campaign with a heavy emphasis on the GOP primary and Donald Trump.
On ABC, chief White House correspondent Jonathan Karl brought up Kentucky Senator Rand Paul’s campaign ad criticizing Trump and rumors of a possible presidential run by former Vice President Al Gore.
Reporting for NBC, correspondent and MSNBC host Andrea Mitchell touted the Iowa State Fair as an essential destination for candidates on both sides this weekend plus the growing possibility that current Vice President Joe Biden could join the Democratic field.
The transcript of the segment from the CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley on August 13 can be found below.
CBS Evening News with Scott Pelley
August 13, 2015
6:37 p.m. Eastern[ON-SCREEN HEADLINE CAPTION: Email Investigation]
SCOTT PELLEY: Tonight, the private e-mail server that Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state is in the hands of the FBI. What's on it may be nothing. What was on it? That's what they'd like to find out and here's Nancy Cordes.
NANCY CORDES: The server the FBI picked up was stored not at the Clinton's Chappaqua, New York home as many assumed but at a data center in New Jersey. A lawyer for Platte River Networks, the I.T. firm that manages the Clintons' e-mail system, told CBS News that the server was moved to the New Jersey facility some time after Clinton left the State Department when the Clintons upgraded their system. The lawyer said the old server is now blank and likely does not contain usable information.
CNET’s DAN ACKERMAN: You can eliminate data from any sort of hard drive or server. Someone may be able to recover it depending how good they are and how good a job you did deleting it in the first place.
CORDES: CNET's Dan Ackerman says the most common method for wiping data clean is to overwrite it multiple times.
ACKERMAN: Almost as if you write something on a chalkboard and then you erase it and then write over it, then erase it, then write over it, then erase it. Eventually, no matter how closely you look, you will never be able to see what the original thing was you wrote.
CORDES: Clinton has acknowledged that she mass deleted up to 32,000 e-mails she considered personal.
HILLARY CLINTON [on 03/10/15]: I didn't see any reason to keep them.
CORDES: The inspector general for the intelligence community says a review of the just 40 of her work-related e-mailed yielded four that “contained classified information” and thus “should never have been transmitted have a an unclassified personal system” like a home server.
ACKERMAN: If you have any sort of device connected to the internet, you've created a pathway into it.
CORDES: The inspector general also says two of those four e-mails should have been considered top secret in part because they contained satellite-based intelligence. Keep in mind, Scott, that determination was based on a review of just one-tenth of one percent of all of Clinton's work-related e-mails.
PELLEY: Nancy Cordes in Washington tonight. Nancy, thank you.
