Republicans on Saturday sought to keep up the pressure on Hillary Clinton, the presumed frontrunner for the Democrats in the 2016 presidential election, over her use of personal email while serving as secretary of state.
Congresswoman Susan Brooks, a member of the House committee investigating the deadly September 2012 attack at the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, used the weekly GOP public radio address to call on Clinton to hand over her email server in order to answer “vital questions”.
“We need to know why the security at our embassy was left inadequate,” the Indiana lawmaker said.
In January 2014, a Senate report found that the government had failed to deliver a “standard of care” needed to protect its staff in Benghazi. The report faulted the State Department, then under Clinton, for not acting on seven intelligence reports that warned of possible security threats prior to the attack.
Another report, called “Benghazi on the record” and critical of Republican concentration on the attack, was released by the Democrats on the House committee in September 2014. “You can continue to argue but one thing you can’t argue is that the questions have not been asked or answered,” said Washington Democrat Adam Smith at the time.
Nonetheless, on Saturday, Brooks asked: “Why were requests for additional security denied? Why was our response not sufficient? Why were some members of the administration slow to acknowledge a terrorist attack had actually occurred? It is simply unacceptable for so many questions to remain unanswered.”
This week, Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, the chairman of the committee, issued a subpoena for Clinton’s emails. He has also called for an independent review of her private email server.
“By handing her server over to a neutral, third-party arbiter, Secretary Clinton can help us move forward with figuring out what happened to our people,” Brooks said. “Because this isn’t about Hillary Clinton, or Trey Gowdy, or me. It’s about the four brave Americans we lost … The people who knew them – who loved them – deserve the truth.”
Gowdy wants Clinton to appear before his committee on at least two occasions – to testify about her emails and to give a testimony about the September 2012 attack. In January 2013, Clinton gave testimony on Benghazi before a Senate committee. At the beginning of this year, Elijah Cummings, a Maryland Democrat and ranking member of the House committee, said Clinton had agreed to testify before it.
“She said: ‘I’ll do it, period.’ The fact is she was very clear. She did not hesitate for one second,” Cummings told CNN in January.
Clinton has asked the state department to release her emails. Of the 62,320 emails she sent and received as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, she did not preserve 31,830, according to her office.
“After her work-related emails were identified and preserved, Secretary Clinton chose not to keep her private, personal emails that were not federal records,” her office said in a nine-page statement.
If the inquiry into Clinton’s emails is breathing new life into the Benghazi investigation, Gowdy said, Democrats have no one to blame but Clinton.
“You can blame House Republicans for a lot of things, but we didn’t advise Secretary Clinton to set up a personal email server,” he said. “We didn’t create the drama.”
