Hillary Clinton Email Scandal: Kim Dotcom Says Deleted Mails Can Be Recovered

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s email controversy may be far from over, if internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is to be believed. The man wanted by the U.S. on copyright infringement and money laundering charges said on Twitter Thursday that all of Clinton’s “permanently deleted” emails can, in fact, be accessed. Legally.

Clinton had deleted all emails from the private server she was using when she was serving as secretary of state. Copies of mails she considered work-related were saved and shared with a State Department investigation, which blocked the release of some of those mails till after the presidential election. An FBI investigation unearthed more of her emails, over 100 of which had classified information, but the agency decided not to bring any charges against her.

But about 32,000 emails were never handed over by Clinton to anyone, messages she said were personal and permanently deleted from her server. It is precisely those messages that Dotcom says can be retrieved.

The X-Keyscore, or XKS, that Dotcom is referring to is a computer system, once secret, that the NSA uses for searching and analyzing global internet traffic and data. According to Dotcom, access logs of XKS (a list of everything accessed using the XKS system) never disappears, and therefore, all of Clinton’s emails accessed by the NSA will still be on the server.

On his Twitter account, Dotcom also says he knows how the XKS system works because the New Zealand government had used it to spy on him. And to provide more credence to his claim, he even says a former NSA consultant, whistleblower and another man wanted by the U.S. government — Edward Snowden — would agree with him.

Dotcom’s claim rests on the assumption, however, that the NSA certainly accessed Clinton’s emails while she was using a private server when she was secretary of state. And with WikiLeaks already releasing, in batches, all of her emails, the point Dotcom is making is that there is a way to access them without hacking.