The Daily Beast has a good look at the underlying information from Kevin Poulson today. Here’s the relevant section:
So the DNC didn’t turn over its physical servers because they were still using those during the campaign — and the FBI had access to the imaging. Former FBI Director James Comey said he wanted direct access to the DNC servers for purposes of accessing the live network — and that’s where the DNC turned the FBI down. That’s not uncommon, apparently:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/33163/no-dnc-isnt-hiding-its-servers-fbi-create-false-ben-shapiro
When cyber investigators respond to an incident, they capture that evidence in a process called “imaging.” They make an exact byte-for-byte copy of the hard drives. They do the same for the machine’s memory, capturing evidence that would otherwise be lost at the next reboot, and they monitor and store the traffic passing through the victim’s network. This has been standard procedure in computer intrusion investigations for decades. The images, not the computer’s hardware, provide the evidence. Both the DNC and the security firm Crowdstrike, hired to respond to the breach, have said repeatedly over the years that they gave the FBI a copy of all the DNC images back in 2016.
So the DNC didn’t turn over its physical servers because they were still using those during the campaign — and the FBI had access to the imaging. Former FBI Director James Comey said he wanted direct access to the DNC servers for purposes of accessing the live network — and that’s where the DNC turned the FBI down. That’s not uncommon, apparently:
When the computers belong to a cooperating victim, seizing the machines is pretty much out of the question, said James Harris, a former FBI cybercrime agent who worked on a 2009 breach at Google that’s been linked to the Chinese government. “In most cases you don’t even ask, you just assume you’re going to make forensic copies,” said Harris, now vice president of engineering at PFP Cyber. “For example when the Google breach happened back in 2009, agents were sent out with express instructions that you image what they allow you to image, because they’re the victim, you don’t have a search warrant, and you don’t want to disrupt their business.”
https://www.dailywire.com/news/33163/no-dnc-isnt-hiding-its-servers-fbi-create-false-ben-shapiro