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Comment by idibidiart | Hacker News Reader

I think the email itself is evidence of crime. Why bother with recovering the data when the absence of it allows the prosecution to portray the worst imaginable criminal scenario. They actually shot themselves in the foot because no matter how bad their crime is it cannot be as bad as erasing the data and degaussing 3 times. The prosecution can claim the absolute worst has happened. And they have no way to prove them wrong. And a murder weapon (the email)

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Prosecution cannot claim anything without evidence. Now there’s only evidence of obstruction of justice by some IT manager, but no evidence to support charges of election fraud by executive branch of government.

There should be laws that give the benefit of the doubt to the prosecution/litigant in situations like this. Not holding my breath though.

Giving the benefit of the doubt to the prosecutor goes against the “innocent until proven guily” ideology. You’re basically saying, “he unknowingly deleted evidence he didn’t know was evidence. That proves it’s a conspiracy because we now don’t have evidence to prove our case”

It’s the reason cops are seen as immune to the law; The courts give them the benefit of the doubt a lot.

Degaussing 3 times is not evidence of knowingly deleting evidence. I find that laughable.

It's clearly evidence of knowingly deleting data. It may not be evidence of knowingly deleting evidence. The distinction matters, because deleting data is not a crime.

Degaussing 3 times. Who does that when deleting data? Unless they don't want investigators to find the data? And isn't the data in this case a public record? Why delete a public record indelibly unless they had manipulated that record and wanted to hide the fact..?

> Degaussing 3 times. Who does that when deleting data?

The same kind of people who think they need 35 passes to wipe their hard drive.

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