Seriously, Dutchie. I've got electoral dynamite on Hunter and I'll be sitting on my laptop all day sending those 25MB increments. Even if it takes me 100 emails, that's faster and more secure than sending it UPS. I mean, UPS ffs, Dutchie!!!???? Who is actually going to do that??!!??!!
I take it you've never actually sent a data dump over 100 e-mails with attachments, or you'd understand why no-one would. My own personal cutoff is 5 e-mails before I'm moving to the cloud, DVD, portable hard drive or flash drive.
At the very least, you're going to give an assistant the flashdrive and a plane ticket and put them on a flight. This is mega million $$$$$ shit here.
That could only make arguable sense if: 1) it was the only copy of the data (or the original),
and 2) you already knew what value the material had, or might have.
As Carlson said, the data had been copied in New York, so it was never going to be critical whether the drive was lost (which your cadre had wrongly assumed). The 1st story was about who had intercepted it, and why. It wasn't an announcement that the data had been destroyed/lost. You guys misinterpreted the story from the outset.
The data was being evaluated by Fox even while UPS looked for the missing flash drive. It's probably still being evaluated now. Fox has not said there will be nothing published out of that data. They've only said they're not going to publish material that relates to Hunter alone.