The Vice story sheds a little light on some ambiguities. It sounds like the Vice hacker was able to download the files but not delete them. S/he was unable to decrypt them, as were Vice. TPS obtained a hard drive from which the same encrypted files had been deleted. They were recovered, but still encrypted, so then the forensics dept had to run a brute force attack on the password to open them, which took a LONG while.
(I'm piecing this together from things I've been told and things I'm guessing)
So the cops were *in possession* of the files all along, but they maybe couldn't actually *play* them until very recently. This might explain why there were contradictory accounts coming out about whether they had them or not.