Yesterday, the FBI posted a redacted interview report (PDF) that sheds more light on what Paul Combetta was trying to do when he turned to Reddit for help modifying an archive of Hillary Clinton's e-mails. (Combetta is the technician contracted to provide support for the hosted mail server used by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.) The report also reveals that Combetta had mentioned a "Hilary [sic] coverup" in an e-mail thread. Combetta told FBI investigators that the comment was a joke about a change in retention policies.

Combetta's name is redacted from the interviews, but the interviews match up with other information now public about his conversations with the FBI. The interviews, which took place on February 18 at the offices of Platte River Networks in Denver, covered much of the support work Combetta did on the Exchange e-mail server to help users with archived messages—including a July 2014 export of all Clinton messages to .gov addresses. The export was requested by Cheryl Mills, Clinton's former chief of staff at the State Department. Combetta burned the archive on a DVD to mail to Mills, but she then requested a secure electronic transfer of the file. So Combetta arranged the digital transfer and broke the DVD in half.

According to his interview with the FBI, former Clinton IT aide and State Department employee Bryan Pagliano contacted Combetta on July 24 to discuss using a "regular expression text editor" to modify the e-mails in the archive. The reason, Combetta said, was because Pagliano and Mills were concerned that Clinton's new e-mail address—the one that she moved to after leaving the State Department—would be exposed. They were concerned because "when a user changes his or her e-mail address, Outlook updates the old e-mail address with the new e-mail address" in the Exchange mailbox. Combetta was later confirmed as having posted on Reddit, where he asked for help in finding a tool that would allow him to do such a replacement.

On December 10, Combetta began work on a trouble ticket created after a phone call with Mills and Clinton attorney (and former staffer) Heather Samuelson. Mills and Samuelson said they wanted the last 60 days of e-mail for both Clinton and her aide Huma Abedin transferred to e-mail accounts that were not on the Exchange server. Combetta said that there was no request to migrate the rest of the content. In an e-mail dated December 11, 2014, entitled "RE: 2 items for IT support," and a work ticket regarding e-mail retention changes the next day, Combetta made a reference to a "Hilary [sic] coverup operation". He told the FBI that "was probably due to the recently requested change to a 60 day email retention policy and the comment was a joke," the FBI interviewers reported.

Combetta could not recall a conversation with Clinton's attorney David Kendall in March of 2015. When presented with an e-mail dated March 25, 2015, entitled "Clintons" and a work ticket "referencing a conference call with Kendall and Mills," Combetta was stopped from answering by PRN's attorney. The attorney stopped him based on his "protections under the Fifth Amendment." But on March 31, Combetta installed BleachBit on the administrative server—which he said he believed he installed to delete the exported e-mail archives he had created of Clinton's e-mail.