A nifty piece from the Daily Mail. You would think a cabinet member who had every reason to assume that classified information would be circulating on her server would insist on a company renowned for security. Instead she went with a small outfit in Colorado, largely unknown outside the region, whose pipeline to the Clintons appears to have been the fact that their VP of sales was a big Democratic booster and got them some work at the 2008 Democratic convention.

Were state secrets being stored on a server in an apartment bathroom?

One [former Platte River Networks employee], Tera Dadiotis, called it ‘a mom and pop shop’ which was an excellent place to work, but hardly seemed likely to be used to secure state secrets. And Tom Welch, who helped found the company, confirmed the servers were in a bathroom closet.

Speaking to Daily Mail Online at her home in Castle Rock, Colorado, Tera said: ‘I think it’s really bizarre, I don’t know how that relationship evolved.

‘At the time I worked for them they wouldn’t have been equipped to work for Hilary Clinton because I don’t think they had the resources, they were based out of a loft, so [it was] not very high security, we didn’t even have an alarm…

Wherever the truth lies, Tera thinks Platte River was an unsuitable choice for Clinton, she said: ‘It’s so weird, because it’s just a small IT company. I know they’ve expanded quite a bit since I left but I do think it’s strange, we only had the three owners and like eight employees. We didn’t do any work in other states.”

Not only that, but to this day they don’t have an IT security clearance from the feds to handle classified materials. One of the founders of the company, who’s since left, also said he was surprised to learn that Platte River would have a major client like Hillary Clinton given its small regional reach. When the Daily Mail asked him how he thinks the company landed on Hillary’s radar, he noted that they’d done some work for John Hickenlooper’s mayoral campaign in Denver in 2004 and wondered if that had come to Hillary’s attention somehow. They did a bit of work for the 2008 convention in Denver, which Hillary attended of course, so maybe a connection was made there. Or maybe their vice president of sales somehow drummed up the business. He’s a Democrat and attended the convention as well. But the timeline is strange here: All of these connections are happening circa 2008, yet Hillary didn’t move her server out of her basement and over to Platte River until mid-2013 according to a company lawyer who spoke to the Daily Mail. Why would she have remembered them five years later? The only theory I can come up with is that it’s precisely because they were small, with fewer leak opportunities, that she might have trusted them more than she would have a behemoth IT firm. Secrecy is a core Clinton value, after all … except for secrecy from the hackers who’ve undoubtedly been intercepting her e-mail on her private server for years.

But wait. Via Gabe Malor, there’s more weirdness. WaPo’s splashy piece last week about the FBI seizing Hillary’s (now supposedly blank) server noted that they took it from a “third party data center” in New Jersey. It’s not precisely clear how long it had been there, but the article implies that it was moved sometime in 2013, when Platte River began maintaining the server for her. Does that mean the Daily Mail piece is wrong and that Hillary’s server was never stored in that retrofitted bathroom in Denver? If Platte River is a small regional company, why are they using a third-party data center in Jersey for Hillary’s business? Are there actually two servers, one the old one that Hillary used as Secretary of State that’s now been wiped and the other the new Platte River Network server that may be housing an archive of her old data? If so, have the feds seized the latter? Most importantly, what motivated Hillary to farm her business out to Platte River in 2013, after she’d stepped down at State? If secrecy was the name of the game, the obvious thing to do was to keep the server on the premises or in some other secret location and not involve third parties. You would think she’d feel more comfortable doing that after she left State since at that point she knew there’d be no more classified information being shared on it, yet that’s the moment when she decided to get rid of it. Presumably that has to do with her fearing that executive privilege would no longer shield her communications from congressional Republican eyes once she’d left the administration, but you’d need a lawyer to confirm that. What’s going on here?