The chairman of the House Benghazi Committee renewed his call Wednesday for Hillary Clinton to be interviewed by his panel amid revelations that she didn’t respond to a different congressional inquiry two years ago about whether she used a private email account while serving as secretary of state.
"Congress is interested in better understanding why the State Department either failed to answer previous questions about Secretary Clinton’s use of personal email to conduct public business or in the alternative the State Department’s failure to adequately investigate her use of private email when specifically asked by Congress," committee Chair Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said in a statement Wednesday.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., then-chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent the State Department a letter on Dec. 13, 2012 asking if Clinton or any senior department official ever used a personal email account for official business.
Issa also asked "Does the agency require employees to certify on a periodic basis or at the end of their employment with the agency they have turned over any communications involving official business that they have sent or received using unofficial accounts?"
Clinton left the State Department on Feb. 1, 2013. The agency responded to Issa’s letter on March 27, 2013 with a generic description of the State Department’s email policies, The Times reported.
"Evidence that Congress inquired about her use of private email years before the disclosure that she exclusively used personal email only heightens Congress' need to speak directly with Secretary Clinton to ensure the public record is complete," Gowdy said.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the Benghazi committee’s ranking Democrat, accused Republicans on the panel of trying to negatively impact Clinton’s Democratic presidential campaign.
“Unfortunately, it appears that the Select Committee on Benghazi has now become a taxpayer-funded effort to damage Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president,” Cummings said in a statement. “The Committee has had Secretary Clinton’s Benghazi-related emails for weeks, and she has been ready to testify in public for more than six months. Yet Republicans refuse to schedule her hearing and continue to squander millions of taxpayer dollars drawing out these proceedings as long as possible.”
Last month, Gowdy’s committee formally asked Clinton to appear before lawmakers for a closed-door "transcribed interview regarding her use of private email and a personal server for official State Department business" by May 1.
Clinton, through a spokesman, said she told the committee months ago "that she was ready to appear at a public hearing."
The committee also requested that she turn over a private home server to an independent third party for analysis after she told the panel that she permanently deleted emails from the device. She said her attorneys had turned over 30,490 emails to the department in response to a request from the agency but that she’d deleted more than 32,000 emails that she considered personal
Gowdy’s panel is considering what to do if Clinton doesn’t turn over her server.
"Those conversations are ongoing but the committee’s position remains the same, the best way for Clinton to resolve the many questions regarding her email arrangement with herself is to turn over the server to a neutral, third-party arbiter for independent analysis," said Jamal Ware, a spokesman for the committee.
Comments