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.
