House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) has demanded an interview with employees of the IT firm that handled Hillary Clinton’s private email server. The demand comes after images of one employee on Reddit asking for advice on how to modify emails.
Platte River Networks employees Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton “pleaded the Fifth Amendment when subpoenaed to testify about the server before the House Oversight Committee.”
Someone deleted the post, but Reddit users found it in the archives. It reads:
“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, by a user called “stonetear.”“Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”
No one has yet confirmed that Combetta used the “stonetear” account on Reddit, but users noticed that a Paul Combetta on Etsy also has the “stonetear” username while “the inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address stonetear@gmail.com.”
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC), the chairman of the Oversight’s Government Operations subcommittee, told The Hill that his committee is reviewing the post:
“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,” Meadows told The Hill. “The date of the Reddit post in relationship to the establishment of the Select Committee on Benghazi is also troubling.”The Reddit message was sent on July 23, 2014, according to an archive of the page saved by other users. The day before, the Benghazi Committee had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of related records, according the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s use of the server.
But Smith also wants his committee to interview the employees. He sent a letter to the Eichner Law Firm, who has represented the company during the Congressional investigation of Hillary’s server:
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.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.
Earlier this month, the FBI released its notes from its investigation. The papers revealed that, despite Hillary’s claims, hardly anyone knew her email address. Another showed that an unnamed person deleted Hillary’s archive mailbox from the PRN and proceeded to use BleachBit to delete any exported emails and files.
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