Cross-posted from Burningbird

Update

I weep for humanity, I really do.

Now Snopes has a long posting on this story, as if it's all something so incredibly profound.

The Hill has decided to double-down on it, like it's discovered the holy grail.

And the House Oversight Committee has ordered Reddit to preserve the posts, even though every single one is already preserved on the Wayback Machine.

Every member of these organization's IT departments is laughing their heads off right now. Why?

Because all it was, was a simple question asking how to delete an email address in meta data. The only component of Hillary Clinton's emails that wasn't relevant then, and isn't relevant now.

Earlier

An anonymous Twitter user has cracked a new Clinton email scandal.

Not.

A new story in The Hill about the Clinton emails appeared on my radar today. Evidently the House Oversight Committee is, in all seriousness, investigating a Reddit post.

A deleted Reddit post.

This post was dug up out of the archives by an anonymous Twitter account.

SMOKING GUN: "BleachBit" Paul Combetta ASKED TO STRIP OR REPLACE VIP's EMAIL ADDRESS! https://t.co/nz13MqzWth #MAGA pic.twitter.com/qQII96JI76

— Katica (@GOPPollAnalyst) September 19, 2016

Yeah, a deleted, anonymous Reddit account, dug up by an anonymous Twitter Account. What passes for Deep Throat in the social media age.

The Reddit post is from a person with a handle of stonetear. Our intrepid reporters at The Hill and their little pundit minions have loosely connected the stonetear handle to Paul Combetta.

Paul Who?

Paul Combetta is an IT specialist currently employed by Platte River Networks. He was involved in the maintenance of the Clinton email server when it moved to PRN. He's the guy who told the FBI, "Oh sh.." because he didn't establish a new protocol to only save emails for 60 days, and when he realized it later, deleted the emails.

Remember BleachBit and Trump's acid wash? Yeah, that IT guy.

Anyway, the recovered Reddit post is asking for tech help:

“Hello all- I may be facing a very interesting situation where I need to strip out a VIP’s (VERY VIP) email address from a bunch of archived email that I have both in a live Exchange mailbox, as well as a PST file,” stonetear wrote. “Basically, they don’t want the VIP’s email address exposed to anyone, and want to be able to either strip out or replace the email address in the to/from fields in all of the emails we want to send out. I am not sure if something like this is possible with PowerShell, or exporting all of the emails to MSG and doing find/replaces with a batch processing program of some sort. Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”

The date on the post is July 23, 2014, the day after the House Benghazi Committee and State reached an agreement on producing Clinton's emails.

All the little tin hats are just having a field day with this. So much so that I hate to burst their bubble.

But I'm going to burst their bubble.

Whether stonetear is Combetta or not, all this post tells us is that an IT person was trying to strip out an email address from a bunch of emails.

Were they Clinton emails? Probably not, but it doesn't matter. I can say this because a) Hillary Clinton was no longer using the email address at the time the emails were turned over, b) Clinton's email address was already known at the time, and c) the Clinton emails published by State all display Clinton's old email address. The email address wasn't stripped.

You strip out an email address because you don't want the public to get access to it. Other than that, there's no reason to do so.

It made absolutely no difference in the Clinton emails.

That isn't to say that our friends at Judicial Watch didn't do their usual misrepresentation of the non-story. Notice the reference to Delete ‘Very VIP’ Emails. No longer deleting email address...emails.

Hillary Clinton’s Network Host Asked Reddit How to Delete ‘Very VIP’ Emails https://t.co/qvvqLgI0gO

— Judicial Watch (@JudicialWatch) September 20, 2016

Don't these people have a life?