Hillary Clinton’s IT guy asked Reddit for help altering emails, a Twitter sleuth claims
A “non-techie” Twitter sleuth ers has just caused Hillary Clinton’s campaign a new headache: According to screenshots she published Sunday - which are now reportedly under review in the House Oversight Committee - the IT specialist who deleted Clinton’s emails may first have turned to Reddit for advice on the technology.
The Reddit posts in question come from a user named stonetear, and were made in July and December 2014. @GOPPollAnalyst, the woman who unearthed the posts, claims stonetear is Paul Combetta, a computer specialist with Platte River Networks who worked with Clinton’s staff during her time as secretary of state.
In the posts, stonetear asks for technical advice on retaining and deleting email messages that are more than 60 days old, as well as on removing the email address of an unnamed “VERY VIP” client from email archives.
“Hello all,” one of the posts begins. “I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone. ... Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”
“The issue is that these emails involve the private email address of someone you’d recognise,” another one says.
The big question, of course, is whether Combetta is in fact stonetear - and what that would mean for both the IT specialist (who was granted immunity by the Justice Department during the Clinton email investigation) and for Clinton herself. The posts do not appear to reference deleting emails, but rather to hiding email addresses. That could signal nothing of note.
“If it is determined that the request to change email addresses was made by someone so closely aligned with the Secretary’s IT operation as Mr Combetta, then it will certainly prompt additional inquiry,” he said. “The date of the Reddit post in relationship to the establishment of the Select Committee on Benghazi is also troubling.”
The evidence that @GOPPollAnalyst and others have uncovered is entirely circumstantial, but extensive.
The same email address was used to register a Facebook profile for a “Paul Hamilton,” which is mostly blank and has only 40 friends. One of them is, however, a woman whose maiden name appears to have been Combetta until a 2015 wedding.
The timing of two of Stonetear’s Reddit posts also coincides with events in the Clinton email saga. One post, dated July 24, 2014, came one day after the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the State Department reached an agreement on producing records. The second, dated December 10, 2014, and describes a 60-day email retention policy, came the same month that a longtime Clinton aide requested that their email retention policy be shortened to 60 days.
