The destroyed e-mails ... still exist ... imo.
You are far more correct than you know. From the article:
Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she is unsure how her emails could have ended up on a device she viewed as her husband's computer, the seizure of which has reignited the Clinton email investigation, according to a person familiar with the investigation and civil litigation over the matter.
On this occasion, I will submit that Huma is possibly telling the truth, due to the fact that most, if not all, of the Obama administration, the Clinton campaign, and the DNC continue to demonstrate an abysmal lack of understanding as to how the Internet works.
The short version is that once you turn something into Internet Protocol (IP) traffic, it exists forever, and in far more locations that you can imagine.
For those who have not been a participant, electronic discovery, while occasionally tedious and painstaking, is brutally thorough and comprehensive.
For an individual who understands how the Internet works, as long as one has access to one or more of the devices involved in creation, transmission, or storage of the IP traffic (far easier to obtain than most people realize), one does not require the technical resources of the NSA or law enforcement to perform technical discovery. Widely available commercial and open source network management and discovery tools will suffice.
The FBI is not concerned solely with what NYPD or other law enforcement agencies found with regard to Anthony Weiner's sexting to a minor. They are (or should be) far more worried about what several hundred Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), many of them state sponsored; not to mention innumerable individuals, mostly males between the ages of 15 and 30 who are in their Mom's basement waiting to get called to dinner; have already recovered from the network of private email accounts, most of them instantiated on devices with the default administrator accounts and passwords still enabled, in wide use across the Obama administration.
The fact that the individuals involved apparently exhibit a strong preference for mobile cellular communications devices, makes electronic discovery by outside parties even easier, since the technology that allows these devices to roam across networks, makes it impossible to provide any effective security to a commercial mobile cellular device.
Incredibly, individuals within the Obama administration continue to use personal, commercial, email accounts to conduct government business, providing an open invitation to any threat that has not participated to date, to join the festivities.
To sum up:
1. Once you hit send, the toothpaste can never be put back into the tube. Your electronic communications will be discoverable and recoverable from a wide variety of devices for a very long time.
2. If electronic evidence is involved, you will eventually be forced into the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.