FBI: No evidence Clinton ordered deletion of subpoenaed email archive

The FBI found no evidence that either Hillary Clinton or her aides ordered an IT technician to delete an email archive that was under congressional subpoena, Director James Comey testified Wednesday.

{mosads}”We did not have evidence to disbelieve [the technician’s account] and establish someone told him to do that. No email, no phone call, nothing,” Comey told the House Judiciary Committee during an oversight hearing  that was largely taken up with questioning about Clinton’s server.

The technician, Paul Combetta, has become a focus in the latest congressional investigation into the private server Clinton used while secretary of State. Earlier this month, Combetta invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination before the House Oversight Committee.

According to the FBI’s report of its investigation, Combetta deleted an archive of emails from the server in March 2015, after the House Select Committee on Benghazi issued a subpoena for records relating to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. outpost in Libya.

According to the FBI’s notes, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills instructed Combetta’s company, Platte River Networks, to delete a set of archived emails in December 2014. The Denver-based company maintained Clinton’s server.

Mills told investigators Clinton had decided she no longer needed access to emails more than 60 days old.

But Combetta apparently forgot the request and didn’t immediately comply. He told investigators that sometime between March 25 and March 31, 2015, he “had an ‘oh s—‘ moment and … deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the [Platte River Networks] server.”

Combetta used a software known as BleachBit, which is designed to prevent the recovery of deleted files.

At that time, the Benghazi panel had already issued both a subpoena and an order that records relating to the attacks be preserved.  

Clinton and Mills told the FBI that they had no knowledge of the technician’s deletion of the emails. The technician, according to the report, “was aware of the existence of the [Benghazi Committee] preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton’s email data on the [Platte River Networks] server.”

“His account is credible,” Comey said Wednesday. “He was told to do it in 2014, screwed up and didn’t do it, panicked when he realized he hadn’t and then raced back in and did it after Congress asked for the records and the New York Times wrote about them.”

The FBI director also defended the Justice Department’s decision to give Combetta immunity in exchange for talking to investigators, which Comey said he requested because Combetta had deleted the archive.

“We learned that no one had directed him to do that,” Comey said in response to questioning from House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

“The hope was if he had been told to [delete the archive], that would be a great piece of evidence. If we give him immunity, maybe he’ll tell us ‘so and so told us,’ and then we’re working up the chain,” Comey said.

Chaffetz has asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Clinton or her aides were involved in the decision to delete the archive when it was under subpoena.

The committee is also probing a 2-year-old Reddit post believed to be written by Combetta in which he sought advice from other users on how to alter the to and from lines of emails belonging to a “VERY VIP.”

The July 23, 2014, request was made the day after the Benghazi Committee had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of related records.

“How is this not a conscious effort to alter federal records? I mean the proximity to the date is just stunning,” Chaffetz said Wednesday.

Comey said Wednesday that his team was aware of the Reddit post but that investigators “concluded that he wanted placeholders not the actual address in the from line.”

According to the FBI’s report, a Platte River Networks employee told investigators that Mills requested on July 23 that he export an archive of all of the emails in Clinton’s mailbox that were sent to or received from a dot-gov email address.

Mills was told that when an Outlook user changes his or her email address, the program updates the old email address with the new one, the technician said.

Mills reportedly expressed concern that Clinton’s “then-current email address would be disclosed publicly and would be different from the one Clinton was using at the time the emails were actually sent,” according to the FBI.

The Platte River Networks employee discussed how to find and replace the new email address with the old in a conversation with the State Department IT official who set up Clinton’s server, but “could not accomplish the replacement.”

Republicans on Wednesday hammered Comey on Combetta’s role in destroying the emails, characterizing the Reddit post and the eleventh-hour decision to delete the archive as obstruction of justice.

“You indicated that you had no reason to disbelieve Paul Combetta when he told you that he erased a hard drive on his own. However, in the exchange on Reddit, he said, ‘I need to strip out a VIP’s email’ … basically they don’t want a VIP’s email address exposed to anyone. Those two statements are not consistent,” said Rep. Raúl Labrador (R-Idaho). 

“How can you say he was truthful when he told you nobody told him to act this way but you saw this Reddit account where they told him he needed to act in this way?” 

“I think the investigative team’s assessment is that those are about two different subjects,” Comey said. “One was a year before, in the summer of 2014 about how to produce emails and whether there is a way to mask the actual email address.

“The other is about actually deleting the content of those emails sitting on the server.”