Trey Gowdy to Hillary Clinton lawyer: Turn over server to third party

Politico ^ | 03/20/2015 | Lauren French

[E. Pluribus Unum]

The chairman of the House Committee on Benghazi is formally requesting Hillary Clinton turn over her private email server to a third party for a “neutral” investigation of its contents.

Rep. Trey Gowdy wrote to Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, Thursday asking the former secretary of state to make the server available to the State Department’s inspector general “or another neutral, detached, and independent arbiter.”

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House Republicans have sought access to the server since the news earlier this month that Clinton used a private email for official purposes during her time at State and her documents were not stored within the State Department, but instead on a private server off-site.

Clinton regained control over those emails but turned over thousands of pages of documents to the State Department for release — except personal emails that Clinton said during a press conference focus on more mundane matters like yoga, her daughter’s wedding and family vacations.

But the exclusion of thousands of emails from the State Department’s review prompted questions from Republicans that Clinton may have withheld official correspondence from her time at State. Gowdy was one of the first Republicans to call for Clinton to make the server available for review — a request Speaker John Boehner joined earlier this week.

“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,” Gowdy wrote in the letter.

The State Department, Clinton and 10 of her staffers are already under a subpoena request for documents the former secretary of state turned over to the agency, but that request does not force her to turn over the server stored in her New York home.

The committee already has 15,000 documents containing Clinton’s emails, many of which have never been shared with congressional investigators before. But the panel is seeking all correspondence from her time as secretary of state that deal with Libya. Gowdy also said in the letter it took months of email exchanges and briefings with the State Department for officials there to share with the committee that Clinton only used a personal email address. And the panel’s investigators were never told she retained control of the emails on a personal server, he said.

This formal request from Gowdy amps up his panel’s participation in what has become a heated political battle. Clinton and other congressional Democrats have dismissed the focus on emails as an attempt to undermine Clinton’s likely 2016 presidential campaign. Gowdy has stated repeatedly he is only interested in investigating the Benghazi attacks but this letter gives him significant responsibility for overseeing the transfer of Clinton’s full email archives to Congress.

The letter also sheds greater details on a dispute between Gowdy and Clinton over the number of email addresses she had while at State. Gowdy said earlier this month Clinton could have multiple address — an assertion Kendall denied, saying she only used one personal email at a time but employed two during her whole tenure as secretary.

Gowdy wrote in the letter that his committee received emails from Clinton’s hdr22@clintonemail.com address and another address known as “H.”

“The “H address raised the possibility that Secretary Clinton used more than one email address, including the possibility that the “H address was associated with a ‘.gov’ address,” Gowdy wrote.

Gowdy asked for a response from Kendall by April 3. The State Department’s inspector general is Steve Linick.

[cripplecreek]

So will their house burn down under mysterious circumstances?

[Don Corleone]

Trey has the stones. Does he have the authority?