Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee, has demanded a meeting with the technology specialist accused this week of seeking advice on how to scrub emails from Hillary Clinton’s server on an online forum.
In a letter sent Monday to an attorney representing Paul Combetta, an employee at Platte River Networks, the Texas Republican detailed his committee’s “need to speak with the employees” of the firm tapped to manage Clinton’s emails in the months after she left the State Department.
Screenshots of Reddit posts purported to come from Combetta circulated on social media Monday. Although Combetta has not confirmed the authenticity of the posts, the user reported to be Combetta attempted to delete the offending pages amid growing media interest.
“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,” the user reported to be Combetta wrote in 2014, around the time the House Benghazi Committee began demanding copies of Clinton’s emails from the State Department.
Combetta was granted immunity during the FBI’s year-long investigation of Clinton’s private email use. His involvement in the destruction of Clinton’s records raised eyebrows this month after a 58-page report made public by the FBI showed Combetta had scrubbed emails from her server using BleachBit.
The Platte River employee used the digital deletion tool after the New York Times first exposed Clinton’s personal email network to the public, erasing records in violation of a preservation order issued by the Benghazi committee.
Smith asked in his letter whether the FBI was aware, when it closed the email investigation in July, of what appeared to be Combetta’s public description of Clinton’s server.
