Opponents of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton have long wondered if she was directly involved in deleting the information from her controversial homebrew email server.
Thanks to a two-year-old comment on the social media site Reddit, some critics think they may finally have the proof.
Users believe they’ve uncovered a post on an email experts forum in 2014 that is believed to be from former Hillary Clinton computer specialist Paul Combetta, soliciting advice from other experts on how to wipe the former secretary of state’s servers.
Later, the user asks for help with retaining and purging emails that had been automatically archived after 60 days.
That’s right — purging old emails, right there in black and white.
Clever internet sleuths have discovered the username ‘stonetear’ is a common online alias used by Combetta.
According to U.S. News, “The evidence connecting Combetta to the account is circumstantial, but also voluminous. The inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address stonetear@gmail.com, a search of domain registration information using the service whois.com indicates. An account for a person named Paul Combetta on the web bazaar Etsy also has the username stonetear.”
What is especially alarming is the timeline associated with the newly discovered posts.
The first was posted on July 24th, 2014 — just one day after the House Select Committee on Benghazi reached an agreement with the U.S. State Department to produce the Clinton email records.
The second was posted on December 10th, 2014, around the same time the FBI’s report on the Clinton investigation shows that Cheryl Mills, a Clinton aide and longtime pal, had requested that the State Department’s email retention policy be shortened to 60 days. Mills, according to the FBI, “instructed [redacted name] to modify the email retention policy on Clinton’s clintonemail.com e-mail account.”
Clinton and Mills had previously told the FBI they were not involved in Combetta’s deletion of the emails when it was under subpoena. If connected to Combetta, these post imply that Clinton may have indeed been involved in destroying evidence in the face of a coming investigation — a serious crime.
This new evidence is damning enough to have caught the attention of the House Oversight Committee. North Carolina Rep. Mark Meadows, the chairman of the panel’s Government Operations subcommittee, told The Hill, “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.”
Since the posts were uncovered, user stonetear has been frantically destroying his posts. But not before they were archived here and here by fast acting supporters of Presidential candidate Donald Trump on his popular forum, /r/The_Donald.
Thanks to their quick thinking, Clinton finds herself back in hot water.
— The Horn editorial team
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