FBI Director Kash Patel said Tyler Robinson, the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk, wrote a note stating his intention to “take out” the influential conservative activist.
Patel, speaking to Fox & Friends on Monday, said the FBI had “forensic evidence” of the note, but that it had “since been destroyed.”
They have a note but it’s been destroyed. Yeah, nothing fishy about this BS at all and it goes without saying completely incompetent that they continue to leak half baked, incomplete investigative information.
My guess would be that it was a note on some form of digital media. Say you make a document on your computer that you later delete. The data doesn’t actually get deleted, your computer just removes the location from it’s giant table of contents and marks the space “available to write”. Typically that information can still be retrieved using software tools until it is actually overwritten, and even then there are exceptions. So yes, it is entirely plausible for them to have forensic evidence of a note that someone attempted to destroy.
Except that isn’t what he said. He didn’t say that someone attempted to destroy it. He said it was destroyed.
Maybe I should have left that out, that’s just me analyzing it too much. But lets say you shred a document. You would probably say that you’ve destroyed that document. If someone then took the pieces from the trash and painstakingly put them back together into a readable document, did you still destroy it? Or did you attempt to destroy it?
That would be an attempt. There is a reason why US DoD regulations have required levels of “shredding.” The method must make the material unable to be reassembled. His wording said they had forensic evidence of a note, but the note was destroyed. This implies they no longer can give that note to the people asking for evidence. If his team was able to reassemble it, then he could have given that evidence over. He was very clear that he was unable to provide any evidence.
Now, what he might have meant was they found pointers to a memory location on a harddrive that had truly been wiped. A simplistic analogy would be like how Word shows you recently edited documents, but if you change the name of a document outside of Word it will not be a correct pointer when you try to select it from history in Word. There might be forensic evidence pointing to a file that was created, but they cannot access the file due to an ACTUAL deletion.
Thanks for adding in some more clarity. I worked as a cyber security analyst for the DoD for quite a while (IAT II level stuff) so I know it can get a little esoteric if you aren’t in that world. But absolutely, they may have found an index/pointers but the data itself was already overwritten. Or hell they could have found a thumbnail image stored in a cache somewhere that was clear enough. I was just trying to help people understand how something could be both “destroyed” and recovered at the same time. Language can depend on perspective sometimes, and none of us can really know the answer just based on verbage in a report. Could be the person talking to the press didn’t have a clear understanding. Either way it will be interesting to see what, if anything, comes of it.
Side note: since you brought up shredding, I thought I’d share the ridiculous process I had to go through when I was active duty. We had to use a crosscut shredder, dump it into a bucket of water to turn it into a slurry, let the slurry dry and then burn the remains lmao.
Or it just gets automatically uploaded to microsoft.