'Shady Sh*t': Platte River Networks Employee Expressed Concern About Clinton Emails

Yesterday, two witnesses who worked for Platte River Networks, the Colorado-based firm that managed the Clinton server after Hillary left the State Department, pleaded the Fifth before the House Oversight and Reform Committee hearing titled “Examining Preservation of State Department Records.”

In March of 2015, Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton deleted Clinton’s archives even though they were aware of a court order and a congressional subpoena to preserve the records.

The House Oversight and Reform Committee on Tuesday released an email dated August 19, 2015, that was sent between Platte River Networks employees. The email expressed deep concern over the destruction of the records.

Republican Congressman Jim Jordan pulled up the email during the hearing and said it was from either Combetta or Thornton.

The email expressed a keen desire for documentation of Clinton’s deletion requests and a sense that maybe they had bitten off more than they could chew when they won the contract to manage Clinton’s server.

“Wondering how we can sneak an email in now after the fact asking them when they told us to cut the backups and have them confirm it for our records. Starting to think this whole thing is really covering up a lot of shaddy (sic) sh*t,” the worried employee wrote.

Two weeks after the New York Times broke the EmailGate story, Platte River officials joined a conference call with a longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills. Shortly thereafter, on March 31, the employees wiped the server clean with BleachBit.

Jordan said, “We have three guys — one on the front end, Mr. Pagliano who helped Mr Cooper set it [Clinton’s private server] up, take the Fifth and get immunity, and now we have two guys on the tail end, Mr Combetta and Mr. Thornton, (who didn’t work for the government) they take the Fifth, and Mr. Combetta at least, gets immunity.”

Jordan explained that by the time of the August 19 email, it was beginning to dawn on Combetta and Thornton that they had been given “all these instructions” to destroy documents via telephone calls and conference calls, but they didn’t have anything in writing — so they they might be in trouble.

“Guess what?” Jordan said. “They are.”