I can just hear the supervisors talking to the IT people ... “Look, but don’t look too hard!”
They got the message!
I was put into a situation like this a while back when I was an Exchange administrator. We had an executive who was caught with kiddie porn on his laptop and was summarily fired. Our manager was very good friends with the guy. When HR came around asking for email records, I was put into a situation where my direct manager asked me to “take my time,” while HR was going ballistic over the possibility that the records were “lost.”
We provided a report that showed the record range they wanted was in offsite storage. They requested the backups, and we reanimated the data and provided it to HR. Our manager resigned 2 days later before the bombshell came out that the two of them were running a child pornography website from the corporate network.
Those were an interesting couple of months.