House Oversight Committee Orders Reddit To Preserve “Oh Shit” Guy’s Posts

The House Oversight Committee, chaired by Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), has issued a preservation order to Reddit related to all threads posted by Hillary’s tech guy from Platte River Networks, Paul Combetta (aka the “Oh Shit” guy).  The preservation order comes just days after a political researcher exposed a Reddit thread from July 2014 in which Combetta sought tech advice on how to “strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived emails” (all of the details can be found in our previous post here:  “Dear FBI, This Is Intent: Hillary’s “Oh Shit” Guy Sought Reddit Advice On How To ‘Strip VIP’s Emails’“).

In comments to The Hill, Chaffetz confirmed that the House Oversight Committee is pursuing the new Reddit discovery “with vigor” but noted that precautions were required to “verify the authenticity” of Combetta’s posts.  Meanwhile, Chaffetz did confirm that Reddit is “cooperating” with the preservation order. 

The order “has the weight of law, you can’t destroy things and hope things magically get erased,” he told The Hill Wednesday.

The allegations “fit the pattern of what we think was happening,” Chaffetz said.

“We have to verify the authenticity but we are pursuing it with vigor,” Chaffetz said. “On the surface it may be accurate, but we’ve got to make sure [the Reddit posts] are preserved and we have to dive deeper into the authenticity.”

Let’s just hope that Reddit takes these preservation orders more seriously than Combetta who admitted to the FBI in March 2015 that he “was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton’s e-mail data on the PRN server” even though he went ahead and deleted her emails anyway.  

We first wrote about the “Oh Shit” guy three weeks ago when the FBI decided to dump their redacted investigation notes on the world on a Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend (see “The “Oh Shit” Moment: Hillary Wiped Her Server With BleachBit Despite Subpoena“).  After reviewing all of the FBI notes in detail, we concluded that post by noting that “something tells us this “Undisclosed PRN Staff Member” [Combetta’s identity had not been revealed at that point] is not going to make out as well as Hillary when all the dust settles”…With each passing day that prediction seems to be drawing closer to reality.