The House Oversight Committee has voted to hold former State Department IT aide Bryan Pogliano after he didn’t show up for a hearing last week despite being subpoenaed. Pagliano set up Hillary Clinton’s private email server when she served as Secretary of State:
“Subpoenas are not optional,” Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said Thursday. “Mr. Pagliano is a crucial fact witness in this committee’s investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server to conduct government business.”
The committee issued a subpoena to Pagliano for the hearing on Hillary’s server last week, but he refused to attend. A second hearing was held Thursday, but once again, Magliano did not show up, leading members to vote on the resolution.
Pagliano struck an immunity deal with the Department of Justice when the FBI investigated Hillary’s server:
“Under those circumstances, Mr. Pagliano has no fear of criminal liability preventing him from testifying before the committee,” Chaffetz said Thursday.Democrats say that the agreement is “limited” and therefore does not protect Pagliano before the Oversight Committee. Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) pointed to an outstanding criminal referral from Chaffetz that asked the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia to investigate deletions from the server.
Pagliano’s lawyers said he already invoked his Fifth Amendment rights before the House Select Committee on Benghazi, which should apply to this investigation as well. Chaffetz shot down that argument since “he has questions that fall outside the purview of the Benghazi panel.”
Chaffetz issued subpoenas on September 9 to Pagliano and Platte Rivers Network employees Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton, who both pleaded the Fifth Amendment. Justin Cooper, a former employee at the Clinton Foundation, did testify:
Mr. Cooper acknowledged that the server he helped Mr. Pagliano run faced brute-force hack attempts with “some frequency.” Mr. Cooper also said he had access to the server, even without security clearances that would qualify him to handle the kind of top-secret information Mrs. Clinton was exchanging through the server.
The FBI said someone at the IT company “deleted an archive” of Hillary’s emails. Combetta was that person, but the DOJ also granted him immunity during the FBI investigation.
However, Reddit users opened a new can of worms for Combetta when some found an old deleted post:
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.”
House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) sent a letter to Combetta’s lawyers demanding an interview with him. Chaffetz also sent a resolution to Reddit to preserve any posts that could possible be connected to their investigation of Hillary.
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