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Computer Specialist Who Deleted Clinton Emails May Have Asked Reddit For Tips (usnews.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from U.S. News and World Report: An army of reddit users believes it has found evidence that former Hillary Clinton computer specialist Paul Combetta solicited free advice regarding Clinton's private email server from users of the popular web forum. A collaborative investigation showed a reddit user with the username stonetear requested help in relation to retaining and purging email messages after 60 days, and requested advice on how to remove a "VERY VIP" individual's email address from archived content. The requests match neatly with publicly known dates related to Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary of state. Stonetear has deleted the posts, but before doing so, the pages were archived by other individuals. "ARCHIVE EVERYTHING YOU CAN!!!!" a person wrote on a popular thread on the Donald Trump-supporting subreddit r/The_Donald, as the entries disappeared. 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 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. And, perhaps most damningly, there are the dates. Stonetear posted to reddit on July 24, 2014: "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..." U.S. News and World Reports adds: "On July 23, 2014, the House Select Committee on Benghazi had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of records, according to an FBI report released earlier this month on the bureau's probe of her email use." Stonetear submitted an additional post to reddit on Dec. 10, 2014 that reads: "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?"
UPDATE 9/19/2016: Slashdot reader NotInHere points out that there is a Slashdot user named "StoneTear" as well.
UPDATE 9/19/2016: Slashdot reader NotInHere points out that there is a Slashdot user named "StoneTear" as well.
50% of IT is knowing where to go for help
To be fair, no one knows how to manage Outlook. (Or any full-fledged email service.)
Email, calendaring, and contacts are a nightmare.
And when I say "no one", I'm including Microsoft and Google. Yes, I've used their professional, big contract big dollar solutions.
OTOH Trump doesn't hide that he's a flagrant racist and that's totally cool.
Donald Trump does not hide it, that's true. That's because he, by all appearances, is not racist.
But, if you accuse him of racism, you have ample evidence, don't you? Let's see it, shall we? Be sure, though, to include only the things Trump actually said or did — not somebody else paraphrasing and otherwise engaging in hearsay...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
She has a plan. It's the same plan that she always uses. As Peggy Noonan recently wrote, the Clinton Scandal Ritual is to:
Lie, deny, revise, claim not to remember specifics, stall for time. When it passes, call the story “old news” full of questions that have already been answered. “As I’ve repeatedly said . . .”
I would love if this will be the thing that stops Hillary, but she's as slippery as a greased weasel. She's already got the FBI and the Attorney General in her pocket so there's really no one left to prosecute her.
If this story gets any traction at all, watch how quickly she will throw this guy and anyone else standing near him under the bus without a second thought.
Let's just get rid of both the Republican and Democrat candidates this year. The Green and Libertarian parties are a good enough substitute for both and as much as you might disagree with some of their stances, their candidates aren't morally bankrupt idiots. Otherwise I think I'm just going to write in Caligula's horse this year.
Seems there is a slashdot user named stonetear as well.
https://slashdot.org/~stonetea...
His comments:
https://slashdot.org/comments....
on Tuesday April 16, 2002, (archived link)
The IIS patches aren't on liveupdate, you have to go get them
on Thursday January 24, 2002, (archived link)
I'm contracted to a state government, and let me tell you, everyone here saves EVERYthing for cover-your-ass purposes.. it's really sad to see every little memo back to 1997 in someone's inbox taking up PHAT amounts of disk space on the GroupWise server ... sigh
Thursday July 19, 2001, (archived link)
Gasbag Joe Liberman ... LOL right on! I just moved from Michigan, and he's one quack I'm not sorry to see gone. Well everyone knows that the liberal agenda includes removing any personal responsibility or blame for your actions from you, and putting them in the lap of big scary corporations and 'the internet' and such. Blah. ;) ST
Note: I do think clinton should win, but I'm still doing this, and if its just for transparency purposes.
You seriously would vote for someone to uphold the "rule of law" who it seems has no respect for the law???
Seriously amazing. So you are fine with one set of rules for the "elite" and one set for everyone else eh?
Trump may be slime, but at the moment I don't think there is any sort of definitive proof he's broken the law,. If there were it almost certainly would have come
out by now and be front page headlines for every news organization in the US....
Here's a thought how about the DNC replaces her with someone who has NOT attempted to break the law? Failing that how about someone who doesn't have a paper trail showing they tried??????
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
There is nothing to be fair about. This guy had no business managing Exchange if he's asking questions like this. A simple search on Google would have given him an answer. If he's asking these sorts of questions he's maybe only slightly above the average help desk person who is answering the main line and reading from scripts and I think that is pushing it.
Not to mention his unprofessional millennial speak "Very VIP, really VERY VIP". 1st rule of being a professional, you don't talk about your shit, especially when you're up to no good. He's a dumbass from the ground up.
I've managed Exchange and Outlook just fine and in a smaller environment (medium size business) it's pretty brain dead for someone with training. Exchange only becomes a nasty beast when you have a large organization and Hillary's personal email server doesn't qualify as that. They really should have been using some sort of Linux solution to start with. Then replacing HRC's email address would have been pretty simple since they'd just have to run a script to edit a bunch of text files. Editing a saved PST or the Exchange DB, if anyone knows Exchange, well good fucking luck with that. Google for some tools and maybe you'll run across something.
That if HRC doesn't win in November, she'll be in jail a year from November?
Get a DOJ not paired with the dems, and HRC's defenses fall apart. She's done too much, she either pardons herself or goes to jail.
Yeah I did. And I unlike you realize the following -
1. stripping the email address was almost certainly at a minimum an attempt to hide the fact that she was using a private server for government emails. (Something which would have gotten a "normal" person fired if not charged with multiple felonies)
2. stripping/altering the email address would have allowed them to cherry pick items - e.g. "well this email is potentially a problem, good thing it doesn't have clinton's email address on it!"
3. Later actions by the IT consultant (destroying evidence which was under subpoena) indicate the above was not simply "oooh we want to protect her private email address" rather it indicates they were looking at hiding or destroying the information.....
I dislike Trump but seriously just because he's the Republican candidate should not mean you are willing to overlook this kind of crap.
If the DNC wasn't corrupt at the core you probably would have had Sanders instead....
Service guarantees Citizenship! Questions Guarantee GITMO.... Amerika Uber Alles!
4. Stripping the email address allows them to truthfully claim they did a search for all emails from/to her address, and provided every single one of them. Dishonestly left unsaid, in the traditional Clinton manner, is that they also knew there were lots of emails which actually were from/to her which they didn't provide.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
This post from the exchange server subreddit might not answer all the questions, but helps me as someone not familiar with exchange to understand tools that are available for litigation and discovery, and maybe why and when they were or weren't used.
https://www.reddit.com/r/exchangeserver/comments/53ick9/remove_or_replace_tofrom_address_on_archived/d7tjg3v
To me it sounds like they wanted to tamper with the record before letting anyone else go over it with the normal tools.
The problem with most of the minor parties is that behind the occasional great ideal lives a world of incredible stupidity that would end society as we know it.
Well at least that's how it typically happens in most places.
Funny that my current attitude concerning Clinton comes from the death of another SA goon.
So far nobody's got any real dirt on Clinton.
Aside from the Obama administration who has an interest in protecting Clinton. And it's just national security felonies. No big deal.
Meanwhile Bush Jr deleted 22 million emails.
Because that's all the same once you ignore the differences such as Clinton's grossly negligent mishandling of classified information or intentional bypassing of State Department IT. And that Bush didn't do it, but rather the Republican National Committee.
I'm tired of people blowing off Clinton's long train of scandals and crimes with the same old rationalizations: "you can't prove it" and "Bush/some other Republican did it too".
I dislike Trump but seriously just because he's the Republican candidate should not mean you are willing to overlook this kind of crap.
What kind of crap? Deleting emails? Without direct knowledge what was in those emails, you only have speculation as to why they were doing this. Where as with Trump, you have his own mouth to tell you that he doesn't respect your rights or the constitution and that he's a flaming racist and a hyper nationalist. Deleting emails seems trivial in that light.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/l...
Thank you for Correcting The Record.
$0.05USD has been deposited in your account.
Yeah I did. And I unlike you realize the following -
1. stripping the email address was almost certainly at a minimum an attempt to hide the fact that she was using a private server for government emails. (Something which would have gotten a "normal" person fired if not charged with multiple felonies)
Except they already would have known she was using a private email address. That was the reason for the document request in the first place.
More likely it would be the case that they didn't want her email address on the thousands of pages of printouts they sent, maybe Clinton was hoping that the address wouldn't be published and she could keep using it.
It would be like a phone number, the moment it's published it's pretty much useless and you need to update everyone with your new contact info.
2. stripping/altering the email address would have allowed them to cherry pick items - e.g. "well this email is potentially a problem, good thing it doesn't have clinton's email address on it!"
3. Later actions by the IT consultant (destroying evidence which was under subpoena) indicate the above was not simply "oooh we want to protect her private email address" rather it indicates they were looking at hiding or destroying the information.....
Possibly, though this guy talking about his "VERY VIP" client doesn't seem particularly suited to the uber-competent cloak and dagger world.
And the nuking actually makes a lot of sense if you think you've gotten everything you're legally supposed to.
At that point she's under no legal obligation to keep her remaining non-work emails, but the moment someone thinks to subpoena them she has to keep them around and they become at risk of public disclosure.
If I was faced with the possibility of my enemies getting a copy of my personal inbox I'd launch my hard drive into the sun.
I stole this Sig
This leaves no room for doubt.
So what?
When Comey laid out all. of. the. elements. necessary for conviction of thousands of counts of espionage act violations, and then recommended not prosecuting someone that he knows bloody well is guilty, it was made perfectly clear that this administration won't prosecute a Clinton.
The only way she ever sees justice is if she loses the election, and I wouldn't count on Trump to do the right thing, either.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."