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Comment by headhunter | Hacker News Reader

At first I thought this was a total hoax, but the account has been deleted and the incriminating posts are over 2 years old. Here is a pastebin I found of online information linking all his profiles together: http://pastebin.com/NmXcUC1X

This is pretty incriminating.

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This isn't incriminating at all. There's no mention of changing the content/body, only removing her address from the to/from fields. That's a sensible thing to do if she doesn't want her private email address to be public knowledge, and the presence of her address in the to/from field can be inferred since, you know, it's her inbox.

I feel like Hillary could hire someone to take her dog for a walk and millions of people would find it corrupt and scandalous for some reason.

Removing her address isn't a big deal.

However the part about the 60 day retention policy and the user being able to choose which emails are saved past that policy might well lead to valid questions about the decision process on what was and was not retained.

Sure it is. It means Hillary sent emails that appeared to not be from her when they were, meaning they are emails out there relevant to the FBI investigation that were never included. I doubt this fact came out during their investigation. It also means that the data Hillary herself had to turn over was incomplete, since she could have left out lots of emails that "weren't hers" because the sender address was different.

I don't want to speculate on who's account this is, and perhaps I'm missing something, but tokenizing the to/from addresses sounds like exactly the sort of thing you'd want to do before publicly releasing a lot of emails.

Replacing VIP@example.com with ##VIP1## allows you to release the messages without revealing the email addresses of every person they've ever interacted with.

It also would be a good idea if you're doing this to solicit opinions about it in order to prove to a judge or grand jury that you're following some form of best practices to do this rather than just making up shit on your own.

Of course it should have really been done from a throw-away to avoid precisely this kind of spectacle from the general public.

The one thing I'll say is that clearly this IT guy really is an IT guy and is completely clueless about optics.

About the Pontiac Aztec mentioned in that post, some 4chan user found 2012 Google street-view images of what is/was apparently his house (there was a Paul R Combetta that lived there) with a Pontiac Aztec in the driveway (he asked for help with his Aztec in /r/cartalk 3 years ago)

This seems to have taken place in July 2014, which is many months before the emails went missing (Mar. 2015). Even taking into account that he was apparently instructed to delete the email in Dec. 2014 (and forgot to), it still leaves a large amount of time between these two incidents.

Look at the timing as laid out in

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-19/dear-fbi-does-const...

and it's more clear.

Timeline here: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-09-02/fbi-report-shows-ho...

But The Hill has the more important detail:

http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/296680-house-pan...

"The Reddit message was sent on July 23, 2014, according to an archive of the page saved by other users. The day before, the Benghazi Committee had reached an agreement with the State Department on the production of related records, according the FBI's investigation into Clinton's use of the server."

> This is pretty incriminating.

It is, but it isn't.

One could argue that someone, let's say Bob, happened to overhear some guy named Paul needing to do exactly this. He overheard it at a bar.

Bob then thought "oh, well if it's someone really VIP, this could make for some good lulz with my efriends. Who does Paul work for that is _really_ VIP? Let me Google Paul."

"Oh, here's his email address... stonetear@gmail.com. I wonder if he's on reddit. ... Guess not. Let's make a post that's pretty obviously incriminating."

I think that'd be the first argument made, at least. IANAL, but I do have some courtroom experience.

An IP is also not a person, https://torrentfreak.com/ip-address-not-person-140324/

Stonetear's post history spans for years, is quite extensive, and includes photos of himself and his family, and references to a car and other items, all of which apparently match up to the subject in question. I became pretty convinced within a few minutes of reading it (and checking the primary material to see if it checked out, which it has so far). If true, this is incredible, that a subreddit was able to uncover publicly available evidence that the FBI missed.

It isn't court of law incriminating, but it's more than enough for the court of public opinion.

> It isn't court of law incriminating, but it's more than enough for the court of public opinion.

I doubt it; its reinforcing for the people that are already inclined to the belief and so need no additional evidence, and not likely to be particularly interesting to most of the rest of the public (who, in any case, has pretty much tuned out the whole issue by now.)

Which is probably all that matters here. I can't imagine Clinton ever seeing serious legal punishment for this stuff regardless of proof, and Mr. Combetta has been granted immunity, but this stuff will definitely affect the election.

Based on what? I mean this would seem to be in the circumstantial category, but that can be evidence. It seems kind of relevant that the guy who just pleaded the 5th to avoid incriminating himself about Hillary's server logs asked this specific question - though not a smoking gun.

I'm also curious of those who think that this was 2 years ago makes it irrelevant... are you guys suggesting that if Hillary's team were committing blatant felonies they wouldn't make any effort to clean up the trail until after it hit the front page? (by if I mean the material conditional)

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