That's not the point. It's illegal for them to do it. That's all you need to know - regardless if there was nothing incriminating on the phones, they broke the law doing it. This isn't just some lifers in some Fed office who effed up. This was a special prosecutor, who knows the laws involved - and would have brought anyone in the White House up on charges if caught doing the same thing. These are government employees who operate under strict evidentiary laws. Their phones and everything on them are the property of the US Federal government. They were ordered to return the phones as part of an investigation over their activities, so it's now also destroying evidence.

It's a big fucking deal. It's not an IT issue, it's a legal issue.