In another complication in the wild ride of the Clinton email scandal, Reddit users believe to have uncovered evidence that a former Clinton computer specialist, Paul Combetta, solicited free advice on how to alter and/or destroy email records on Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Users archived evidence, which, however circumstantial, is convincing. A reddit post by a user “stonetear” was made around the time of the email investigation. There are several reasons to believe the reddit user is indeed Combetta, who was granted immunity by the Justice Department during its investigation of Clinton’s private server after he deleted a large number of emails. The evidence connecting Combetta to the account is circumstantial, but also voluminous. The inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address [email protected], 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.

On July 24, 2014, stonetear posted to reddit:

“Hello all- 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 that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file. 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.
I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort.
Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”

Most damning are the dates: this particular quote was posted precisely one day after the House Select Committee on Benghazi had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of records.
This post was posted in the exact month that a 60 day email retention policy was requested, on Dec. 10, 2014:

“Hello- I have a client who wants to push out a 60 day email retention policy for certain users. However, they also want these users to have a ‘Save Folder’ in their Exchange folder list where the users can drop items that they want to hang onto longer than the 60 day window.
All email in any other folder in the mailbox should purge anything older than 60 days (should not apply to calendar or contact items of course). How would I go about this? Some combination of retention and managed folder policy?”

The FBI report says that Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton aide and attorney, requested in December 2014 that the email retention policy be shortened to 60 days. The FBI report says Mills “instructed [redacted] to modify the email retention policy on Clinton’s clintonemail.com e-mail account” but that “according to [redacted] he did not make these changes to Clinton’s clintonemail.com account until March 2015.”

According to the FBI’s Clinton email report, Combetta used BleachBit, an open source software program described as a “digital shredder,” to delete backups of Clinton’s emails in the period between March 25-31, 2015, several weeks after The Times first reported Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal email account as secretary of state and after the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued a subpoena for her records.

Combetta misled the FBI about the deletion, the bureau’s report states.During an interview this February, he claimed that he did not know of any preservation orders when he scrubbed the emails. But during an interview in May — seemingly after the Justice Department granted him immunity — Combetta said he was aware of the order and deleted the Clinton email archives from PRN’s server and used BleachBit to delete Clinton’s email files.

Under 18 U.S.C. §1519, anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence [an] investigation” is subject to 20 years in prison and a substantial fine.