The House Oversight committee ordered Reddit to preserve the deleted posts of a man suspected of deleting emails off Hillary Clinton’s private email server that were at the time under subpoena.
The request seeks to establish whether Paul Combetta, an IT technician for the firm Platte River Networks, was responsible for a posting on Reddit over 2 years ago which asked for help stripping the email address of a “very VIP” from archived messages.
Combetta was the computer specialist who deleted Hillary Clinton’s emails using the BleachBit app while they were under subpoena but was granted immunity by the Justice Department.
The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, told The Hill that Reddit is “cooperating” with the request, which he says carries the “weight of law.”
“You can’t destroy things and hope things magically get erased,” he said, adding that the allegations “fit the pattern of what we think was happening.”
It is still unclear what the significance behind the posting is, although Reddit holds information such as subscribers personal details as well as IP addresses which the site can use to establish the user’s location.
Rep. Mark Meadows, chairman of the panel’s Government Operations subcommittee, also told The Hill that the committee is pursuing the lead “with vigour” and that they are “trying to make doubly sure that we can authenticate that in a real way, because if not it will be challenged on a number of fronts.”
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