Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, has sent a letter to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s attorney requesting that she turn over her private email server to the State Department’s Inspector General or to another neutral third party.
“The Committee must have objective assurances it, and by extension the House of Representatives as a whole, has received all relevant information requested and necessary for a thorough investigation into what happened before, during and after the attacks in Benghazi, Libya,” he wrote in the letter. “More broadly, the equities in these emails extend beyond this Committee. The House of Representatives and the American people are entitled to a complete accounting of the Secretary’s official record during her time as Secretary of State.”
The letter asks her to respond by April 4.
"Should Secretary Clinton continue to maintain that the server and its contents are hers alone, I will inform the Speaker of the House of Representatives so that he can use the full powers of the House to take the necessary steps to protect the best interests of the American people," he added.
In a statement, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said that the American people will be able to see relevant emails when they are released by the State Department.
"We've turned over all of her work emails, and taken the extraordinary step of asking the State Department to release all of them. When they are released, which we hope to be soon, it will offer an unprecedented opportunity for the American people to see for themselves that they are all there and then some," he said.
Clinton has come under fire since news broke that she exclusively used a personal email account and a private server during her time at the helm of the State Department. The House committee has already subpoenaed Clinton’s personal emails related to Benghazi, with a new deadline of March 27, 2015.
Clinton has promised to make her work-related emails public after review by the State Department, but she has also disclosed that she deleted more than 30,000 “personal” emails from during her tenure as Secretary of State.
"Republican demands for Secretary Clinton’s server seem designed to spark a fight with a potential presidential candidate rather than following the standard practice in congressional investigations," Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking member on the Benghazi committee, said in a statement.
- Alex Moe and Carrie Dann