An army of vigilante Reddit investigators has come across a curious piece of information suggesting Hillary Clinton’s former private computer specialist Paul Combetta might have consulted Reddit for advice prior to the email controversy that ensued back in 2015.
On July 14, 2014, a Redditor by the name of stonetear started a thread seeking opinion on how to purge a series of archived email messages for an undisclosed, but purportedly “VERY VIP” customer.
Here’s what the original thread said:
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.
This Monday, things got really curious when evidence linking Combetta to the abovementioned Reddit thread surfaced on Twitter.
SMOKING GUN: "BleachBit" Paul Combetta ASKED TO STRIP OR REPLACE VIP's EMAIL ADDRESS! https://t.co/nz13MqzWth #MAGA pic.twitter.com/qQII96JI76
— Katica (@GOPPollAnalyst) September 19, 2016
As suggested on Reddit and corroborated by Motherboard, it seems the user stonetear might indeed be Clinton’s former tech guy, Combetta. Although the evidence does appear circumstantial, there’s enough to speculate about this possibility.
A website promoting a guide for the video game Betrayal at Krondor lists Paul Combetta’s email as stonetear@gmail[.]com, while a forum post on Slashdot from 2011 shows a user by the name ‘Stonetear’ brag about being “contracted to a state government.”
Stonetear also has a Google Account profile with a photo that looks awfully similar to Combetta.
The original thread has since been deleted after the newly found information started picking up momentum on Reddit. All of stonetear’s comments seem to have been wiped out too.
Hillary Clinton's IT consultant ('stonetear') has been erasing his secret comments from Reddit on redacting her emails made two years ago.
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 20, 2016
However, you can still access cached versions of both the original thread as well as stonetear’s deleted Reddit comments.
The House Oversight Committee is currently looking into the Reddit affair and claims there’s still a lot more to investigate before any conclusions can be drawn.
In any case, the Clinton email controversy just got a lot more interesting.
We’ll keep you updated as the story develops.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.