Fresh off his big immigration speech in Arizona on Wednesday night, Donald Trump took his mediocre-cop/vile-cop routine to the American Legion’s national convention in Ohio on Thursday morning. The GOP nominee’s roughly 20-minute speech was relatively uneventful, though he appeared to break from the script briefly on the topic of Hillary Clinton and her private email server in order to offer up some highly questionable tech analysis:
In this future, we will have an honest government that includes an honest state department, not pay for play. She probably didn’t mention that to you yesterday. Government access and favors will no longer be for sale, and important email records will no longer be deleted and digitally altered, which is something they just found out two days ago. Bleached. Bleached. Expensive process. Why? Why? 33,000 emails bleached through a very expensive process. You ask yourself, what’s going on?
What is going on here? Trump, it would seem, is referring to recent comments from House Benghazi Chairman Trey Gowdy suggesting that Clinton used a software tool called BleachBit to delete emails from her personal server so that “even God can’t read them.” BleachBit, however, isn’t nearly as sinister as Gowdy has made it out to be—nor does it involve actually dousing your computer with chemicals, as Trump likes to suggest.
As Slate’s Laura Wagner has explained, BleachBit is one of a number of free, open-source software programs that anyone can use to clear unneeded files from computers to free up space and keep systems running smoothly. As one computer security expert put it to CNN last week: “Someone trying to cover their tracks would likely pay for and use a much more expensive, specialized data destruction tool.” Meanwhile, the software’s creator has even said that some of the emails that Clinton deleted could still be recovered from third-party servers, which in theory Gowdy’s omniscient creator would have knowledge of.
Trump, however, would much rather repeat the word bleached a few times and leave the actual facts left unsaid—and unknown to average Americans, let alone the roomful of aged American veterans he was speaking to on Thursday.
