Is it Safe to Recycle content from a Google Penalised site?

Google doesn't penalize content, it applies penalties on domains.

What was the penalty? Was it a manual action or you just noticed one day your Google traffic disappeared and there was no visible penalty in the search console.

If you got a manual penalty for unnatural links and no other site scraped the content, this should be fine. I would still take the time to look over the content and make improvements to it before you publish it.

If Google applied penalties to content, think about the insane negative SEO attacks people could do. I could scrape a piece of content off CNN, get it penalized, then take CNN.com down.

Also, whatever you did, I wouldn't repeat it. So if it was unnatural links, well don't spam the domain out again. They might keep a record of sites they penalize, look at your new site, look it up in their penalized sites database, and instantly ban the new domain, again, you would have to be breaking a rule here though for them to even look.

If the manual action was thin content, well uhm, no it's not a good idea to re-publish it on a new domain.

That depends on the type of penalization you got. If your content was duplicate from another site, then the new site will also be penalized. If it had nothing to do with the content, then you should be safe re-using it.

Reason: "Pure spam
Pages on this site appear to use aggressive spam techniques such as automatically generated gibberish, cloaking, scraping content from other websites, and/or repeated or egregious violations of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines." Effects: All"

I allow an agency to publish content. The quality does read quite well, it's not junk, it's written by real people. But, there are some links..?
Not sure what to make of it.

I guarantee Google keeps an archived copy of deindexed sites.

Google already told you the problem, you should already know which one to pick from on the list they gave you since you built the site.

I should also mention that the theme was free from a share site, which might mean somehow a virus has leaked in and caused an issue, since the content that I can see seems clear and valid. Not sure the best route. Remove the theme and install a clean one, check for a virus, then re-submit for penalization?

You can always recycle content, but the way you do this is re-word everything. That is if we are talking posts. Make different titles . Do things as they were but just a bit different.

Before I read comment replys I've already deleted the theme. I guess that means I cannot check now

Actually, it's still in the trash of cpanel ftp. Should I restore, could anyone help check it?

I've uploaded it to here: fp_discover.zip - Speedy Share - upload your files here

Looks like a typical free theme.

I don't see anything that stands out except the recaptcha, what's that for?

Thanks for replies. Not sure then. The content appears fine. The publisher does place links in each article though, but this would get an out-bound link penalty if this was an issue, right? Confused.