Clinton Email Scandal: New Revelations Of Cover-Up Spell Trouble For Hillary

Paul Combetta of Platte River Networks listens to statements before testifying on Sept. 13 before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. (AP)

No doubt, Hillary Clinton and her avid supporters had hoped the email scandal that has plagued her all year was finally beginning to die down. No such luck. Polls show Americans still care about it — and it remains a major issue in her campaign.

The most recent revelation to show the duplicity and outright lying of Clinton about the email scandal was the discovery that her outside tech specialist, Paul Combetta of Platte River Networks, sought in July 2014 help on the Reddit forum to delete email addresses from the files of a “very VIP” client before shipping them to others. Combetta used the screen name “stonetear,” a name he had foolishly used elsewhere on the web, so it was directly traceable to him.

The Last Refuge blog summed it up this way: “These records, as a consequence of their ownership by Secretary Clinton, are federal records. In essence, Paul Combetta, a private citizen, was seeking assistance on a public forum for how to modify federal records before export to an unknown entity (presumably Cheryl Mills).” (Cheryl Mills served as Hillary Clinton’s counselor and chief of staff at the State Department, and, not surprisingly, also worked with the Clinton Foundation).

Altering archived government records is against the law. When Combetta, aka stonetear, discovered he had been found out, he immediately began scrubbing websites of his comments. Too late, it seems. Rep. Jason Chaffetz has sent a notice to Reddit to preserve all the comments and postings. And now Combetta is scheduled to be questioned by House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith, along with Platte River Networks.

This might all seem like tall weeds, but it isn’t. It is part of the ongoing effort to cover up the criminal misuse of a private email server by Hillary Clinton while serving as secretary of state. National security and tech experts agree: Her carelessness with her emails likely compromised U.S. secrets with Russia, China and possibly other countries. And the possibly illegal actions of Combetta and others to cover up what was happening with Hillary’s illicit email server were done on her behalf — and certainly at her behest.

Recall that, when she found out from the State Department that the House Benghazi Committee wanted copies of her emails and then was subpoenaed, the email archives were deleted using a high-tech memory scrubber called “BleachBit.” It was a clear attempt to destroy evidence in a government investigation.

Even so, despite her efforts, investigators still found some 193 emails that were classified as “secret” or “confidential.” This is a clear breach of the law.

Hillary at various times has implied that she didn’t know the rules and didn’t realize that what she was doing was wrong. But in fact, she was told explicitly by the State Department not to use a private server, and she herself even sent an email suggesting that employees not conduct State business “from personal email accounts due to information security concerns.”

To the progressives and liberals who love Hillary, this is all just a big yucky story about technology run amok. Who cares?

Average people do, that’s who. The “deplorables” and “coal people” who live in flyover country.

A new NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll shows that 64% of voters worry about “Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state.” (She has other problems, too, such as the 44% of Americans who are concerned about her health, and 45% who said they have concerns about Hillary recently calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.”)

As we reported in our own IBD/TIPP Poll, 63% of Americans said they want a special prosecutor appointed to look into Clinton Foundation irregularities and Hillary Clinton’s ongoing email scandal.

The latest revelations won’t help Hillary Clinton’s polling numbers a bit. The woman who was once thought to be a shoo-in, has now been revealed to be a highly flawed candidate with serious character defects that have led Americans to question her as a future possible president. That she is now running neck-and-neck against a man many just six months ago thought was a joke shows the serious trouble her campaign is in.

If Hillary fails to win the presidency, she’ll only have her own hubris about her rogue email server to blame.

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