Get the latest BPR news delivered free to your inbox daily. SIGN UP HERE.

Legal watchdog group Judicial Watch has served Google with a subpoena for all emails believed to be linked to an account used by 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton during her tenure as President Obama’s secretary of state.

According to a press release, the subpoena — which was authorized by a federal court in Washington, D.C. — Platte River Network IT specialist Paul Combetta reportedly accessed the Google account to move Clinton’s emails from a laptop to the firm’s servers before using a program called Bleachbit to destroy the emails and remove all traces of them the computer.

The watchdog said it wants Google to turn over all of Clinton’s emails dating from her time as secretary of state — Jan. 21, 2009 – Feb. 1, 2013. The tech behemoth has until May 13 to produce the emails.

The press release notes further:

The Google subpoena comes in a Judicial Watch’s lawsuit that seeks records concerning “talking points or updates on the Benghazi attack” (Judicial Watch v. U.S. Department of State (No. 1:14-cv-01242)). Judicial Watch famously uncovered in 2014 that the “talking points” that provided the basis for Susan Rice’s false statements were created by the Obama White House. This Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit led directly to the disclosure of the Clinton email system in 2015.

In August, U.S District Court Judge Royce Lamberth instructed Judicial Watch to “shake the tree” on the issue of trying to locate Clinton’s emails.

During that hearing, Lamberth cited a report released by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) “in which he had some very troubling information about a guy named Combetta who had been one of the contract employees on the Clinton emails, and he and the Senator who chairs the Homeland Security Committee released in the Senate this report … and the gist of it was that Combetta had said, I guess, that he had created a dummy email account with all of the Hillary Clinton emails in it in a different name, and the FBI had investigated that to see whether or not the Chinese had ever hacked into it.”

Lamberth went on to note that the FBI determined Chinese spies had not hacked the account, but nevertheless never informed the State Department of the email account and did not turn any emails from the account over to the department.

“So it leaves out in the open whether there are these other emails that State could have obtained but nobody ever bothered to tell State about them,” the judge added.

In December 2017, as then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into alleged “Trump-Russia collusion” was in full swing, former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote at National Review that the Justice Department should reopen a probe into Combetta because when he allegedly destroyed thousands of Clinton’s emails, “they were under congressional subpoena and preservation orders.”

He notes initially, on March 2, 2015, The New York Times actually broke the story about Clinton’s home-brew email server, which she used to hide at least some of her official communications so she could avoid federal open records statutes.

McCarthy adds:

The House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi jihadist attack immediately issued letters directing that the emails be preserved, along with a subpoena for them. The server system storing Clinton’s emails was then housed at a private contractor, Platte River Networks (PRN), which by no later than March 9, 2015, was aware of the directive that the emails be preserved. Combetta was the PRN technician who managed the Clinton server system. Throughout March 2015, he communicated several times with Mrs. Clinton’s agents, particularly Cheryl Mills (Clinton’s confidant and her chief of staff at the State Department).

During these communications with Clinton’s protectors is when Combetta reportedly deleted the two-time presidential loser’s emails and attempted to destroy them with BleachBit.

The emails are likely sitting in storage on one of Google’s servers. At least, Judicial Watch thinks so, and so does Judge Royce Lamberth.