The House Oversight Committee is reviewing a Reddit post that alleges an IT specialist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s private server sought advice on how to alter the contents of “VERY VIP” emails, according to Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.).
Meadows is the chairman of the panel’s Government Operations subcommittee.
“The Reddit post issue and its connection to Paul Combetta is currently being reviewed by OGR staff and evaluations are being made as to the authenticity of the post,” Meadows told The Hill.
Reddit users appear to have uncovered a two-year-old post from an account believed to belong to Combetta, an engineer with Platte River Networks. The Denver, Colo.-based firm managed Clinton’s private server.
The post, which has been deleted but can be read in images archived by Reddit users, coincides with the discovery of Clinton’s use of the server.
“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… 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,” reads the post, by a user called "stonetear."
“Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”
Combetta is currently one of the targets of a broader Oversight investigation on whether Clinton ordered the destruction of emails that had been subpoenaed by the Benghazi Select Committee.
WASHINGTON — A computer specialist who deleted Hillary Clinton’s emails despite orders from Congress to preserve them was given immunity by the Justice Department during its investigation into her personal email account, according to a law enforcement official and others briefed on the investigation.
Republicans have called for the department to investigate the deletions, but the immunity deal with the specialist, Paul Combetta, makes it unlikely that the request will go far. Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the top Republican on the House oversight committee, asked the Justice Department on Tuesday to investigate whether Mrs. Clinton, her lawyers or the specialist obstructed justice when the emails were deleted in March 2015.
Mr. Combetta is one of at least two people who were given immunity by the Justice Department as part of the investigation. The other was Bryan Pagliano, a former campaign staff member for Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign, who was granted immunity in exchange for answering questions about how he set up a server in Mrs. Clinton’s home in Chappaqua, N.Y., around the time she became secretary of state in 2009.