​ Midyear team members told us that Combetta was an important witness for several reasons, including his involvement with the culling process and the deletion of emails and his interactions with several people that worked for Clinton. Several Midyear team members stated that after conducting two voluntary interviews of Combetta, they believed that Combetta had not been forthcoming about, among other things, his role in deleting emails from the PRN server following the issuance of a Congressional preservation order. The witnesses further stated that Combetta’s truthful testimony was essential for assessing criminal intent for Clinton and other individuals, because he would be able to tell them whether Clinton’s attorneys—Mills, Samuelson, or Kendall—had instructed him to delete emails. Combetta was first interviewed on Septemb

During the February 18, 2016 interview, the agents also showed Combetta an email dated December 11, 2014, in which he wrote to a PRN colleague, “I am stuck on the phone with CESC [Clinton’s staff] again.... Its [sic] all part of the Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation  I’ll have to tell you about it at the party.” Combetta told the agents that the reference to the “Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation” was “probably due to the recently requested change to a 60 day email retention policy and the comment was a joke.”91 Department and FBI witnesses told us that Combetta’s explanation for this email seemed credible to them, given ​During the February 18, 2016 interview, the agents also showed Combetta an email dated December 11, 2014, in which he wrote to a PRN colleague, “I am stuck on the phone with CESC [Clinton’s staff] again.... Its [sic] all part of the Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation  I’ll have to tell you about it at the party.” Combetta told the agents that the reference to the “Hilary [sic] coverup [sic] operation” was “probably due to the recently requested change to a 60 day email retention policy and the comment was a joke.”91 Department and FBI witnesses told us that Combetta’s explanation for this email seemed credible to them, given 

​The SSA told us that he believed Combetta should have been charged with false statements for lying multiple times; however, the SSA also stated that he was ultimately satisfied that Combetta’s later immunized testimony was truthful and that he was “fine” with the immunity agreement.

Both prosecutors and agents also told us that Combetta was not someone the government was interested in prosecuting given his role in the case. Agent 1 told us that the absence of evidence that Combetta knew anything about the content of the emails on Clinton’s server minimized the FBI’s interest in prosecuting him. Prosecutor 4 stated:

I was concerned that we would end up with obstruction cases against some poor schmuck on the down, that, that had a crappy attorney who didn’t really, you know, if I was his attorney, he wouldn’t have gone in and been, you know, hiding the ball in the first place. And so at the end of the day, I was like, look, let’s immunize him. We’ve got to get from Point A to Point B. Point B is to make a prosecution decision about Hillary Clinton and her senior staff well before the election if possible. And this guy with his dumb attorney doing some half-assed obstruction did not interest me. So I was totally in favor of giving him immunity.

Prosecutor 2 told us that Combetta’s counsel was “concerned” that the Midyear team would “want to charge somebody...to show we had done something” and “go after some low-level person like Combetta to make a point.” Prosecutor 2 stated, “that was never our intention” and “it was in our interest to...make him and his counsel feel comfortable enough that they were going to give us the facts that we needed to figure out what happened in this case.” 

​They stated that they did not consider charging Combetta with a crime and then seeking his cooperation against other witnesses, because they did not believe he had significant criminal exposure

​Responding to the complaint that the Midyear team “handed out immunity like candy,” he stated:

I hope you also notice our subject here was Hillary Clinton. We wanted to see[,] this very aggressive investigative team wanted to see can we make a case on Hillary Clinton. To make that case they worked up from the bottom. The guy who set up her server, the guy who panicked and deleted emails, he is really not our interest. Out interest is trying to figure out did he give us anything against her

He told the FBI that he was the one who recommended the use of “BleachBit” because he had used it for other clients. Healso acknowledged removing the HRC Archive mailbox from the PRN server between March 25, 2015, and March 31, 2015, and using BleachBit to “shred” any remaining copies of Clinton’s email on the server, despite his awareness of Congress’s preservation order and his understanding that the order meant that “he should not disturb Clinton’s email data on the PRN server.”

According to the FD-302 and contemporaneous notes, Combetta told the FBI that he had an “oh shit” moment upon realizing that he had failed to comply with Mills’s request in late 2014 or early 2015 to “change the retention policy for Clinton’s and Abedin’s existing andongoing mail to 60 days.”

We interviewed seven Midyear team members who attended Combetta’s May 3, 2016, interview, all of whom told us that they conferred immediately following Combetta’s interview and agreed that Combetta’s testimony finally “made sense,”that he had been truthful and forthcoming, and that he did not implicate anyone in criminal activity such that there was a need to “lock in” his testimony in the grand jury. Prosecutor 1 told us that Combetta’s testimony finally “squared with the forensic evidence,” and also corroborated the testimony of other witnesses,including Mills and Samuelson, that they were unaware of the March deletions by Combetta.