A House panel investigating the Benghazi terrorist attacks requested that Hillary Clinton explain her decision to delete the emails that she kept off of a government server.
“[T]his committee is left with no alternative but to request Secretary Clinton appear before this committee for a transcribed interview to better understand decisions the Secretary made relevant to the creation, maintenance, retention, and ultimately deletion of public records,” Representative Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.), chairman of the select committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, wrote to Clinton’s lawyer.
Gowdy wrote the letter in light of Clinton’s attorney refusing to turn over any of the emails that Clinton had retained or to allow an independent auditor (Gowdy recommended the State Department inspector general) to review the server that she used to keep her emails out of government hands. When Gowdy subpoenaed the emails, Clinton’s team asked for a two-week extension. On Friday, the deadline, they said that the server had been wiped clean.
RELATED: The Latest Bombshell from Mrs. Clinton’s Lawyers
“We continue to believe Secretary Clinton’s email arrangement with herself is highly unusual, if not unprecedented,” Gowdy wrote. “The decision to delete these records during the pendency of a congressional investigation only exacerbates our need to better understand what the Secretary did, when she did it, and why she did it. While she has cited a variety of justifications for this arrangement, many questions and details about the arrangement remain unanswered.”
Clinton claimed to have provided all of her work emails to the State Department after leaving office. House investigators note that the database of emails she provided features “huge gaps,” including no emails from her visit to Libya after the overthrow of dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
“We have no emails from that day. In fact, we have no emails from that trip,”Gowdy said on March 8. “There are huge gaps.”
RELATED: The Five Worst Clinton E-mail Excuses
Clinton also told reporters that she used a private email server, rather than an official State Department email address, for convenience’s sake.
“Looking back, it would have been probably, you know, smarter to have used two devices,” she said during a press conference.
But USA Today reports that Clinton did use two devices, a Blackberry and an iPad.