On March 2, 2015, the New York Times publishes a front-page story about Clinton’s emails practices and her use of a private email server.
The Equinix data center in Secaucus, NY. (Credit: public domain)
In the days following the publication of the article, Cheryl Mills, who is one of Clinton’s lawyers as well as her former chief of staff, requests that Platte River Networks (PRN), the computer company managing Clinton’s server, conduct a complete inventory of all equipment related to the server.
In response to this request, an unnamed PRN employee travels to the Equinix data center in Secaucus, New Jersey, where the server is located, to conduct an onsite review of the equipment. At the same time, another unnamed PRN employee logs in to the server remotely to check on it.
This will result in some changes to the security settings of the server around March 7, 2015. Additionally, many emails (other than Clinton’s) are deleted from the server on March 8, 2015. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 9/2/2016)