On Monday, True Pundit published story detailing how Hillary Clinton and her aides directed Platte River Networks and its IT gurus to systematically alter, fabricate and forge emails to protect her communications from being “exposed to anyone.”
On Tuesday, House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith demanded interviews with Platte River IT personnel this week, including Clinton’s former IT guru Paul Combetta, who managed her private email server. Smith’s committee has been investigating how Clinton handled classified email. Congressman Smith demanded that the interviews be scheduled by this Friday.
“If true, these details raise new questions as to whether Platte River Networks purposefully defied legal document retention requirements,” Congressman Smith stated Tuesday, threatening to subpoena the company’s personnel. “Further, it is unclear if the Federal Bureau of Investigation was aware of these facts at the time of their investigation,”
Smith fired off a scathing letter to Platte River’s attorneys Tuesday, demanding access to Clinton’s IT gurus.
True Pundit’s expose detailed how the Clinton request was so unusual, complex and likely illegal that Denver-based Platte River IT executives, who maintained Clinton’s private email server, had to turn to other IT gurus on the clandestine chat forum for a solution to try to satisfy their “VERY VIP” client, as executives dubbed Clinton. Combetta turned to a web forum on computer coding to solicit help with Clinton’s directive to forge her emails, according to documents. Writing under the seemingly-stealth screen name “stonetear,” Combetta asked reddit.com forum users in July 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.
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?”
Complying with such request would violate a host of federal criminal statutes of falsifying and altering federal records. Even Clinton directing Platte River to implement such a scheme likewise violates a number of federal criminal laws.
Hours after the story was published an analysis by True Pundit determined Combetta had deleted all posts and messages from his “stonetear” reddit.com account, including the smoking-gun correspondences detailed in the original expose. True Pundit, however, warehoused many of the posts in case they were deleted from the web site. Congressman Smith was concerned by these revelations.
“Additionally, I am concerned that Mr. Combetta may have made an attempt to delete relevant posts, including the post mentioned above, from his Reddit.com username just hours after reports initially surfaced on September 19, 2016, about his request for assistance on deleting email addresses from archived emails,” Congressman Smith wrote Tuesday. “This raises significant concerns that materials directly related to the Committee’s investigation and responsive to its outstanding requests are being actively destroyed in an attempt to conceal relevant information from coming to light.”
A new True Pundit story was published Tuesday as well, detailing how Combetta divulged sensitive security information on a public web forum, opening the door for hackers to easily access the former secretary of state’s emails.
Combetta is also accused of deleting an untold number Clinton’s emails despite orders from Congress to preserve them. Platte River’s destruction of these emails followed months of warnings from by the House Select Committee on Benghazi to obtain them. The house select committee likewise instructed Clinton’s attorney David Kendall on Dec. 2, 2014, to retain these emails, and a formal House subpoena was issued on March 4, 2015.
Combetta and a Platte River colleague Bill Thornton were on Capitol Hill last week answering subpoenas to testify before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Congressman Smith also wants to interview Thornton. Combetta refused to answer all of committee chairman Congressman Jason Chaffetz’s questions about his role in maintaining Clinton’s private server. That included Chaffetz’s inquiry on whether Combetta received an immunity agreement from the Justice Deoartment to cooperate with the FBI’s now defunct criminal investigation into Clinton’s handling of classified email while secretary of state. Combetta cited his 5th Amendment right not to incriminate himself at the hearing. Combetta’s immunity agreement was divulged in a recent New York Times article detailing its stipulations.
Congressman Chaffetz’s committee has shed light on other internal Platte River communications where company executives scurried to distance the company from what they believed was Clinton “covering up some shaddy [shady] s- -t.”
In another internal message, one executive called Clinton’s requests to Platte River “Hillary’s coverup operation.”
These new revelations, however, place a white-hot light on the FBI’s arrangement with Combetta. If FBI agents were aware of this request from Clinton to illegally mask her emails, one has to wonder even more than usual how Clinton walked away without an indictment form the bureau’s year-long probe. This only adds to other recent troubling revelations regarding the FBI’s investigation.
True Pundit’s Original Expose can be read here.
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