Paul Combetta destroyed Clinton’s emails that were under subpoena, lied to FBI, then after given immunity by Obama DOJ remembered what happened
On March 2, 2015, the New York Times broke the news that Mrs. Clinton, as secretary of state, had used a homebrew server system for all her official email. The House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi jihadist attack immediately issued letters directing that the emails be preserved, along with a subpoena for them. The server system storing Clinton’s emails was then housed at a private contractor, Platte River Networks (PRN), which by no later than March 9, 2015, was aware of the directive that the emails be preserved. (FBI Clinton File, Part 3, p. 18 — First Combetta FBI interview, p. 5, also paginated HRC-76).
Combetta was the PRN technician who managed the Clinton server system. Throughout March 2015, he communicated several times with Mrs. Clinton’s agents, particularly Cheryl Mills (Clinton’s confidant and her chief of staff at the State Department). With the Obama Justice Department’s indulgence, Mills purported to act as Clinton’s attorney in connection with the emails investigation, even though Mills was ineligible to represent Clinton under legal and ethical rules, and because Mills herself was an actor in the facts that were under inquiry.
It was in the course of these communications with Clinton’s agents that Combetta deleted Clinton’s emails and attempted to destroy them with BleachBit so they could not be fully reconstructed. In a nutshell, Combetta had a call with Clinton underlings on March 25, though he has not disclosed which underlings they were, or what was said in the conversation. Two days later (March 27), Clinton lawyer David Kendall informed the House committee that there were no longer any existing emails from Clinton’s tenure. PRN logs indicate that Combetta deleted emails and installed BleachBit on March 31. On that same day, Combetta had a conference call with Mills and Kendall. (FBI Clinton File, Part 3, pp. 18–19.)
In an early FBI interview on February 18, 2016 (FBI Clinton File, Part 3, pp. 14–20), the recalcitrant Combetta lied to the agents, falsely telling them he did not recall deleting the emails. He also refused to answer questions about his conversations with Clinton’s lawyers, particularly the March 25 and 31 conference calls. Strangely, he invoked the attorney–client privilege. This made no sense: Clinton’s lawyers were not his lawyers, and in any event, the privilege would not cover communications related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of a congressional investigation.
(Because an FBI report refers to the “Fifth Amendment” (see FBI Clinton File, Part 3, p. 18), there has been some suggestion that Combetta also invoked his privilege against self-incrimination. While not impossible, this would have been inconsistent with Combetta’s approach to avoiding self-incrimination, which was to lie, not to refuse to answer. A more comprehensive FBI report says Combetta actually invoked the attorney–client privilege. See FBI Clinton File, Part 1, p. 19 — also paginated HRC-19.)
In most Justice Department cases, and certainly in the Mueller investigation, lying to the FBI is treated as what it is — a felony. The specter of prosecution is used to pressure low-ranking players to plead guilty to their crimes and cooperate against more culpable suspects. But this was the Obama Justice Department’s “investigation” of Hillary Clinton, so the felony was instead treated as the occasion to reward Combetta with immunity.
Figuring he was home free, Combetta promptly revised his story in a subsequent FBI interview on May 3, 2016. (FBI Clinton File, Part 3, pp. 21–27.) Now he admitted he had destroyed the emails, but claimed he had done it on his own. Like a bolt from the blue (what Combetta called his “Oh s**t!” moment), he suddenly remembered that Mills had told him, five or six months earlier, to “change the retention policy” so that Clinton’s emails would be deleted automatically after 60 days. Because it was beyond this 60-day window by late March, he supposedly took it on himself to delete the emails, and to apply the BleachBit program for good measure. We’re to believe his contacts with the Clinton camp had nothing to do with it.
On the matter of the March 25 call (i.e., shortly before he started deleting and bleaching), Combetta denied being able to remember it — even being shown an email about the call, which made a cryptic reference to “backups,” did not jar Combetta’s conveniently faulty memory. What is more astonishing, assuming the FBI’s report reflects the full scope of the later interview, is that Combetta was not even asked about his conversation with Mills and Kendall on March 31 — the day he (just coincidentally, I’m sure) deleted and destroyed Clinton’s subpoenaed emails
______________________________
The evidence connecting Combetta to the account is circumstantial, but also voluminous. The inactive website combetta.com is registered to the email address stonetear@gmail.com, a search of domain registration information using the service whois.com indicates. An account for a person named Paul Combetta on the web bazaar Etsy also has the username stonetear.
And, perhaps most damningly, there are the dates.
On July 24, 2014, stonetear posted to reddit:
Hello all- 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.
I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort.
No comments:
Post a Comment