Do they seriously think anyone believes this bs?”
I don't think they care. Since polls show more and more people think this administration is full of crap, they have nothing to loose, in their minds, by saying this
One of my colleagues had a computer crash at least 4-5 years ago and couldn’t retrieve anything on her hard drive. The company sent it to an outside firm (IIRC cost about $400-500) and they were able to restore everything (or most everything - don’t recall specifics). We all know that there are firms out there that can do this. Given the Fed has regulations wrt to the retention of Fed email and other records, why on earth would they destroy a hard drive without restoring the data on that or another hard drive (rhetorical question). Doesn’t make sense, and I, like others, are not buying it in the least (and I wouldn’t know how to restore data if I had to - - just know it can be done via hard drive restoration and/or server storage).