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.

Comments

Re:Stick a fork in....

[RoccamOccam]

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 . . .”

Has slashdot comments too

[NotInHere]

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.

Re:just one thing to say

[msauve]

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.