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Comment by joshmn | Hacker News Reader

> 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/

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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.

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.

> 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.)

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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