Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, will announce on Thursday his intention to hold in contempt the firm responsible for deleting thousands of Hillary Clinton’s private emails.
Platte River Networks, the Denver-based technology firm at the center of multiple investigations, has refused to comply with congressional subpoenas related to its handling of Clinton’s emails.
Since July, the Science Committee has asked three IT firms involved in storing and destroying Clinton’s emails to provide records of the work it performed for the former secretary of state.
Two of those companies have complied, committee staff said. One provided backup storage for Clinton’s emails on its cloud network and the other provided cybersecurity monitoring for her email system.
But Platte River has repeatedly refused to cooperate, Republican aides said.
Paul Combetta, the Platte River employee assigned to Clinton’s account, received an immunity deal from the Justice Department during a year-long FBI investigation into her private email use.
Combetta used a digital deletion tool called BleachBit to scrub roughly 30,000 of Clinton’s emails beyond forensic recovery in March 2015 — just a few weeks after the New York Times exposed Clinton’s email server to the public. At the time, the House Select Committee on Benghazi had issued a preservation order for Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails.
Smith announced Wednesday that he planned to hold a press conference to reveal “next steps” in the committee’s Clinton email probe. A committee staffer told the Washington Examiner he will use the conference to lay out his plan to pursue a contempt resolution for Platte River.
Combetta appeared before the House Oversight Committee last month, but invoked his Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions. His 2014 Reddit posts seeking help from the online forum about how to delete Clinton’s address from emails he had been asked to turn over have drawn increased attention in the weeks since.
A Science Committee aide said correspondence with the technology companies indicated Clinton’s attorneys had asked employees not to comply with congressional subpoenas for documents created during key timeframes.
“We know that the Clintons are directing this obstruction, in this case from Platte River,” the GOP aide, who asked not to be named, told the Examiner.
