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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.

9 of 612 comments (clear)

  1. Re:wow, completely clueless... by bhcompy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    50% of IT is knowing where to go for help

  2. Re:Stick a fork in.... by RoccamOccam · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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 . . .”

  3. I would love it but by JustNiz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  4. Has slashdot comments too by NotInHere · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Has slashdot comments too by whipslash · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nice find. Archived links are nice but trust me, those comments aren't going anywhere.

  5. Re:Stick a fork in.... by isotope23 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  6. Re:just one thing to say by isotope23 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!
  7. Re:just one thing to say by msauve · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  8. Re:No sh!t they're trying to hide something by khallow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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".