The House Oversight Committee is investigating whether one of Hillary Clinton’s tech experts appealed to Reddit for help with altering a cache of “VERY VIP” emails in 2014, one of the panel’s members said Monday.
Rep. Mark Meadows, North Carolina Republican, confirmed lawmakers are attempting to determine if Paul Combetta, a computer specialist with Platte River Networks, authored a series of recently unearthed Reddit posts that may concern the private email server used by Mrs. Clinton during her tenure as secretary of state.
The posts were penned in 2014 by Reddit user “stonetear” and involve efforts to remove the email address of a unnamed person from a collection of archived messages. Independent investigators have linked the “stonetear” handle to Mr. Combetta in recent days and have prompted panel members to launch a probe of their own, according to chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Government Operations.
“The Reddit post issue and its connection to Paul Combetta is currently being reviewed by OGR staff and evaluations are being made as to the authenticity of the post,” Mr. Meadows told The Hill Monday.
Platte River Networks was hired in June 2013 to manage the email server used by Mrs. Clinton, the current democratic candidate for president, as well as her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and their staff. The Denver-based IT company soon after moved the email server from the couple’s home in New York to a data center in New Jersey, where it remained until August 2015 when it was seized by the FBI during the course of the government’s investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a nongovernmental email account.
Documents recently made public by the FBI indicate Mr. Combetta deleted Mrs. Clinton’s emails despite being subpoenaed by Congress to persevere the correspondence. Rep. Jason Chafftz, Utah Republican, last week called on the Department of Justice to consider obstruction of justice charges in relation to the deletions, but The New York Times reported that Mr. Combetta has already been granted immunity by the department.
According to the recently discovered Reddit posts, Mr. Combetta may have relied on the assistance of Reddit users for help managing the Clinton’s email 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,” the “stonetear” user wrote in one post. “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.”
The Reddit post was reportedly published in July 2014 just one day after the House’s Select Committee on Benghazi reached an agreement with the State Department with respect to acquiring correspondence sent and received through Mrs. Clinton’s private server as it investigated the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in the Libyan capital that resulted in the deaths of four Americans.
Internet sleuths have linked the “stonetear” handle to email addresses, internet accounts and other online profiles that correspond with Mr. Combetta. He did not immediately respond to requests for comment Monday, according to U.S. News & World Report.
“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,” Mr. Meadows told The Hill. “The date of the Reddit post in relationship to the establishment of the Select Committee on Benghazi is also troubling.”
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