GOP chairman demands interview with Clinton IT aides after Reddit posts
Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton, recently pleaded the Fifth Amendment when subpoenaed to testify about the server before the House Oversight Committee.
“If true, these details raise new questions as to whether Platte River Networks purposefully defied legal document retention requirements. Further, it is unclear if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of these facts at the time of their investigation,” Smith wrote in a letter sent Monday.
“Additionally, I am concerned that Mr. Combetta may have made an attempt to delete relevant posts, including the post mentioned above, from his Reddit.com username just hours after reports initially surfaced on September 19, 2016, about his request for assistance on deleting email addresses from archived emails,” Smith wrote.
he House Oversight Committee is also looking into the Reddit post.
On Monday, users appeared to have uncovered a two-year-old post from stonetear that coincides with the discovery of Clinton’s use of the server.
“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. … Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out,” reads the post, which has been deleted but can be read in images archived by other Reddit users.
“Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”
The Reddit message was sent on July 23, 2014, according to the archive of the page saved by other users. The day before, the House Select Committee on Benghazi had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of related records, according to the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of the server.
The identity of stonetear is not confirmed. Reddit users point to the fact that an account on the online marketplace Etsy for a Paul Combetta has the username stonetear, and the inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address stonetear@gmail.com.
