Hillary Clinton’s email servers were maintained by a mom-and-pop outfit — run out of an old bathroom closet in a downtown Denver loft, according to a published report on Tuesday.
While Platte River Networks has ties to Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, it wasn’t immediately clearly how the company got hooked up with the former secretary of state and Democratic presidential front-runner, the Daily Mail said.
The company’s work with Clinton was a secret to many of its employees, who were amazed when they learned of it.
“At the time I worked for them they wouldn’t have been equipped to work for Hillary Clinton because I don’t think they had the resources, they were based out of a loft, so [it was] not very high security, we didn’t even have an alarm,” Tera Dadiotis, a former customer relations consultant between 2007 and 2010, told the website.
“I don’t know how they run their operation now, but we literally had our server racks in the bathroom.”
While Dadiotis called Platte River Networks “a great place to work,” she also described it as a “mom-and-pop shop.”
“I don’t see how that would be secure [enough for Clinton],” she added.
Clinton’s use of private email for official State Department business between 2009 and 2013 has dogged her on the campaign trail.
Platte River Networks was founded in 2002 by Treve Suazo, Brent Allshouse and Tom Welch.
The outfit worked out of a 1,858-square-feet loft apartment in downtown Denver until earlier this year, when it moved to a 12,000-square-foot space.
“The whole thing [Clinton’s involvement] is very surprising to me,” said Welch, who sold his share of the firm in 2010.
“I had no idea they had that kind of client. When I was with the company, we were a small Denver business-focused company, we really didn’t do a lot, we did some stuff statewide, may have had a client or two in the western region but we certainly weren’t doing business in Washington, DC, or on the East Coast.”
However, Welch said he believes his former company had the capability to run a secure operation.
“The space that we had our office was essentially designed as a residential unit … the bathroom connected to the master closet and that’s what we retrofitted as a server room,” he said.
“Our internal network was extremely secure. At the time, Inca Street [in downtown Denver] was a relatively obscure location, second-floor office. The technology we had in place was pretty good. The security we had in place at the office was really good to protect our well-being.”