House Oversight Committee Demands Reddit Preserve Posts For Hillary Investigation

House Oversight Committee Demands Reddit Preserve Posts For Hillary Investigation

The House Oversight Committee has demanded that Reddit preserve deleted posts that an IT technician may have written about Hillary Clinton emails.

Earlier this week, Reddit users found an archived post that shows someone asking how to “strip out a VIP’s” email address from the to/from fields. No one has confirmed the username “stonetear” belongs to Platte Rivers Network employee Paul Combetta, but people have found connections between his name and the username.

Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said the committee sent the order, which “has the weight of law, you can’t destroy things and hope things magically get erased.”

He also said the behavior in the post fits “the pattern of what we think was happening.” The Hill reported:

“We have to verify the authenticity but we are pursuing it with vigor,” Chaffetz said. “On the surface it may be accurate, but we’ve got to make sure [the Reddit posts] are preserved and we have to dive deeper into the authenticity.”

It’s unclear what, exactly, the committee will be able to learn from the information Reddit preserves. According to the company’s public policy for handling official requests, it maintains basic subscriber information, like IP logs, which identify the computer used to access a site.

According to the policy, Reddit can maintain deleted records — like a user’s account — for 90 days if it receives an official preservation order. Otherwise, the information will be subject to Reddit’s “normal retention or destruction schedules.”

Combetta and co-worker Bill Thornton “pleaded the Fifth Amendment when subpoenaed to testify about the server before the House Oversight Committee.”

This is the post:

https://twitter.com/mis2127/status/778055487619207168

On Tuesday, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) demanded an interview with employees of the IT firm:

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.

Like I said, they still need to confirm the username belongs to Combetta, but the connections raise red flags. Reddit 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 [email protected].”

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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