I think the laptops were destroyed before the FBI investigation even began. From the FBI report....
December 5, 2014 – Hillary delivers 55,000 printed emails to State Department
December 5, 2014: Mills wrote letter to State that it was Clinton's practice to email State officials at their government email accounts for official business, and therefore State already had records of Clinton's emails preserved within State record keeping systems. Abedin also stated in her FBI interview that Clinton's staff believed relevant emails would be captured and preserved by State if any of the senders or recipiants were using an official State email account. Clinton believed her work related email were captured by her practice of sending emails to State employees official State email addresses. (p. 12)
December 2014 / January 2015 – [redacted] instructs PRN to remove archives of Clinton emails from PRN server.
December 2014: According to Mills, Clinton decided she no longer needed access to any of her emails older than 60 days and instructed PRN person to modify the email retention policy on Clinton's email account to reflect this change. However, he neglected to make these changes until March 2015. (p. 18)
December 2014 or January 2015: Mills and Samuelson requested that PRN person remove all the emails from the July and September 2014 exports from their laptops. PNR [redacted] used a program called BleachBit to delete the email related files so they could not be recovered. He remotely connected to their laptops via ScreenConnect to complete the deletions. He stated that a Clinton staff member told him he/she did not want the .PST file after the export and wanted it removed from the PRN server.
March 2, 2015 - NYT releases an article showing that Hillary used a personal email server in violation of State Department rules.
March 3, 2015: US House Select Committee on Benghazi sent letter to Williams & Connolly requesting preservation and production of all documents and media related to Clinton's two personal email accounts but they submitted an inaccurate email address for one. The following day they issued a subpoena to Clinton to produce the emails pursuant events surrounding the 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi.
March 4, 2015 – Hillary receives subpoena from House Select Committee on Benghazi instructing her to preserve and deliver all emails from her personal servers.
In the days following the NYT article, Mills requested that PRN conduct a complete inventory of all equipment related to the Pagliano server. In response to this request, PRN person traveled to the Equinex datacenter in Secaucus, NJ to conduct onsight review of the equipment while another PRN person also logged onto the server remotely. PRN confirmed no additional data existed on any server equipment, as all data was migrated to the PRN server. (p. 19)
March 9, 2015: FBI investigation found Mills had sent PRN an email referencing the preservation request from the Committee on Benghazi.
March 25 – 31, 2015 – [redacted] PRN Staff Member has “oh ****” moment and realizes he forgot to wipe Hillary’s email archive from the PRN server back in December…which he promptly does using BleachBit.
March 25, 2015 – PRN [redacted] advised during his Feb. 18, 2016 interview that he did not recall seeing the preservation request referenced in the email. During his May 3, 2016 interview he indicated that at the time he made the deletions in March 2015 he was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's email data on the PRN server.
He also stated he did not receive guidance PRN personnel, legal council or others regarding the meaning of the preservation request. Mills and Clinton stated they were unaware that PRN [redacted] had conducted these deletions and modifications in March 2015.
May 27, 2015: State received court order to post Clinton's emails to State FOIA website on monthly schedule. State ultimately concluded it's FOIA production on February 29, 2016.
July 10, 2015: FBI initiated a full investigation based on referral from ICIG.
October 3, 2015: PRN server remained at Equinix facility until it was voluntarily produced to the FBI.
https://vault.fbi.gov/hillary-r.-clinton
