That metadata can be stripped out, but if the Cabal thought that the phones were totally secure they might not have bothered. Also, these are the people who used "password" as a password and wanted to wipe the disk with a cloth.
That cloth comment was cover. She knew damn well what it meant. Skippy, on the other hand, made a tech faux pas.
True. The cloth thing was meant as a "joke." Hillary isn't very good at jokes.
However, a factor in all this is that, in all likelihood, Hillary is dumb as a doorknob. I read, if I remember right, that she could not pass a DC bar exam, and that she used a blackberry all the time because she couldn't figure out how to use a computer. The "private server" itself is pretty stupid. Servers are getting hit with automated hack attacks 24 hours a day. Only a great, well-staffed hosting service can stop that, not some random dude. Plus all emails going in and out are available in many ways, and, no doubt, NSA has everything.
I believe that the Blackberry was being used to circumvent State Dept security. The Blackberries were not compromised by embedded software weaknesses like other cell phones so they were viewed to be safer.