AN IT specialist working for Hillary Clinton appears to have turned to Reddit for help on wiping sensitive information from the former Secretary of State’s emails.

US officials say they are investigating after internet sleuths uncovered the two-year-old forum thread, believed to have been posted by Paul Combetta, an engineer with Platte River Networks, the firm which managed Clinton’s controversial private email server.

“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,” the user going under the name “stonetear” wrote in 2014.

“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.

“The issue is that these emails involve the private email address of someone you’d recognise, and we’re trying to replace it with a placeholder address as to not expose it.”

The post was submitted on 23 July 2014, the day after the US House Committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack had come to an agreement with the State Department to turn over Clinton’s emails.

One user replied: “There is no supported way to do what you’re asking. You can only delete emails after they’re stored in the database. You can’t change them. If there was a feature in Exchange that allowed this, it could result in major legal issues. There may be ways to hack a solution, but I am not aware of any.”

Another wrote: “The functionality is just not built into any tool that I know of. Having that functionality would create the ability to screw with discovery.”

Hillary Clinton's IT consultant ('stonetear') has been erasing his secret comments from Reddit on redacting her emails made two years ago. — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) September 20, 2016

The link between Combetta and the Reddit account have not been proven, but users point out that the engineer’s email account is listed as stonetear@gmail.com, and he appears to use the “stonetear” moniker across a number of different sites including online marketplace Etsy.

After the connection was first made by internet users, “stonetear” began deleting their posts. Rep. Mark Meadows from the powerful House Oversight Committee told The Hill the Reddit post was being reviewed.

“The Reddit post issue and its connection to Paul Combetta is currently being reviewed by [Government Operations subcommittee] staff and evaluations are being made as to the authenticity of the post,” he said.

“If it is determined that the request to change email addresses was made by someone so closely aligned with the Secretary’s IT operation as Mr Combetta, then it will certainly prompt additional inquiry.

“The date of the Reddit post in relationship to the establishment of the Select Committee on Benghazi is also troubling.”

The FBI’s report summarising its investigation into Clinton’s email server showed long-time Clinton aide and former chief of staff Cheryl Mills had instructed Platte River Networks to delete a set of archived emails in December 2014.

Combetta, who was granted an immunity deal from the Justice Department, told the FBI he initially forgot the request but later wiped the emails from the server using special software in March 2015 after having an “oh s***” moment.

A few weeks earlier, Clinton had received a subpoena from House Select Committee on Benghazi instructing her to turn over all emails from her private server.

Combetta and fellow Platte River engineer Bill Thornton cited their Fifth Amendment rights in refusing to answer questions before a congressional committee probing the server scandal last week.