I'm a soft hearted naive liberal, so I'm willing - right now - to assume incompetence or bureaucratic screwup, rather than malice.

However, they need to prove it.

What is the retention policy? Was it followed? Show the emails that proves this was just a routine activity they do regularly, or during transitions of power. Were all of the Obama era phones erased this way? Show us the documents, spreadsheets or database where they kept track of phones to make sure none were lost and confirmation that they were erased. Were the phones just tossed in a box and some lackey went through each one? How were they secured? What was the chain of custody? The idea that they dealt with hundreds of phones without some sort of record is ludicrous. Each of these phones could have sensitive government data on them that foreign governments would love to get their hands on, they must have been tagged and tracked through the erasure process. So let's see the data. Who did what and when.

If that stuff isn't produced or doesn't exist? Either there's a significant problem that needs to be fixed and/or people need to go to jail.