Platte River Networks: FBI ‘Asked Us to Turn Over’ Hillary Clinton Email Server

A spokesman for Platte River Networks, the company which handled Hillary Clinton’s email server after she left the State Department, says the company turned the server over last week at the FBI’s request.

That description of events appears to contradict a claim made by the Clinton campaign last week that the server was handed over at Hillary’s direction.

“So Tuesday of last week, the 11th, the Federal Bureau of Investigation asked us to turn over the email server that was located in the data center,” spokesman Andy Boian told Fox News’s Griff Jenkins. Boian continued, “On Wednesday we did. We turned it right over to the FBI.”

Notably absent from Boian’s description of the handover was any involvement by Hillary Clinton or her staff. Last Tuesday, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill released a statement which framed the handover as a decision made by Clinton of her own initiative. “She directed her team to give her email server that was used during her tenure as Secretary to the Department of Justice, as well as a thumb drive containing copies of her emails already provided to the State Department,” the statement from Hillary’s spokesman Nick Merrill read in part.

When Merrill was asked by the Washington Post whether the FBI had asked for the server before she “directed” it be turned over, he declined to answer the question. The FBI also refused to discuss the nature of the handover.

There appears to have been a short-term benefit to the description offered by the Clinton campaign. Instead of headlines like, “FBI seizes Hillary’s email server,” the initial coverage followed the tone of Merrill’s statement. For instance, the first headline from the AP read, “Clinton campaign says she directs her team to give personal email server to Justice Department.”

According to Boian, the Platte River spokesman, Hillary’s server has been in a New Jersey data center from June of 2013, when the company took possession of it, until last week when the FBI collected it from them. The FBI gave Platte River receipts after it was seized.