Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wiped her private email server clean and did not turn over a single new email to the House Select Benghazi Committee after it subpoenaed Clinton’s private emails, according to Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC), who chairs the Committee.
Gowdy said he learned on Friday that Clinton “unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server.”
“While it is not clear precisely when Secretary Clinton decided to permanently delete all emails from her server, it appears she made the decision after October 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked the Secretary to return her public record to the Department,” he said in a statement.
Gowdy, saying that Clinton should not be able to essentially grade her own papers, had also requested that Clinton turn over her server to a third-party arbiter, but Clinton refused. Gowdy has said that Congress may take legal action to get Clinton’s server, and he said that he and the House leadership are considering the “next steps” in the matter.
“After seeking and receiving a two week extension from the Committee, Secretary Clinton failed to provide a single new document to the subpoena issued by the Committee and refused to provide her private server to the Inspector General for the State Department or any other independent arbiter for analysis,” Gowdy said. “In light of the Secretary’s unprecedented email arrangement with herself and her decision nearly two years after she left office to permanently delete all emails… we will work with the leadership of the House of Representatives as the Committee considers next steps.”
Gowdy has previously said that there were “huge gaps” in the emails the Committee has received from Clinton, who admitted that she deleted more than 30,000 emails that she and her team deemed to be “personal” and not “work-related.”
“There are gaps of months and months and months. And if you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, she has sunglasses on and she has her handheld device in her hand, we have no e-mails from that day. In fact, we have no e-mails from that trip,” Gowdy said in a recent appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation. “So, it’s strange credibility to believe that if you’re on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there’s not a single document that has been turned over to Congress. So, there are huge gaps. And with respect to the president, it’s not up to Secretary Clinton to decide what is a public record and what’s not.”