AS TOLD TO AUTHORITIES, the facts of Clinton's IT guy's story about the deleted emails themselves were validated and supported by his contemporaneous posts redditors found and considerately screenshot/archived on reddit:

Stonetear posted to reddit on Dec. 10, 2014:

Hello- I have a client who wants to push out a 60 day email retention policy for certain users. However, they also want these users to have a 'Save Folder' in their Exchange folder list where the users can drop items that they want to hang onto longer than the 60 day window.

All email in any other folder in the mailbox should purge anything older than 60 days (should not apply to calendar or contact items of course). How would I go about this? Some combination of retention and managed folder policy?

The FBI report says that Cheryl Mills, a longtime Clinton aide and attorney, requested in December 2014 that the email retention policy be shortened to 60 days. The FBI report says Mills "instructed [redacted] to modify the email retention policy on Clinton's clintonemail.com e-mail account" but that "according to [redacted] he did not make these changes to Clinton's clintonemail.com account until March 2015.

• Computer Specialist Who Deleted Clinton Emails May Have Asked Reddit for Tips

Reddit just provided independent verification that this guy's email deletion story was true, by finding the post he made in December that backs up his email deletion story

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Some people are saying his other poses are proof of being ordered to delete emails. But that's only a post in hypothetical language, unlike his other posts where he was actually doing something.

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. 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.

Sounds like he was just thought-exercising and contingency planning!