Archived comments unearthed by citizen-detectives on Reddit indicate that Paul Combetta -- the tech specialist who deleted Hillary Clinton’s emails from her server -- may have sought advice on the website for how to hide a certain “VIP’s” email address.



One archived comment from July 24, 2014 – during the same month that the State Department first asked Clinton aide Cheryl Mills to turn over the former secretary of state’s work-related emails from her personal server – shows Reddit user “stonetear” asking others on the site:



“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… Does anyone have experience with something like this, and/or suggestions on how this might be accomplished?”

On Monday, as users on Reddit uncovered the old comments asking for tech advice, user “stonetear” began deleting every one of his comments and posts – but not before other Reddit users managed to archive them using the website “archive.is,” which allows anyone to archive a webpage (the archived page is then hosted on archive.is indefinitely, even if someone later deletes or alters the original.)



On Monday morning, one Reddit poster wrote “He's actually deleting his comments in real tim[e] right here.” Another made a video of the comments being deleted on the screen as he refreshed the page.