A journalist informed me this morning that a source close to Congressman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) and the House’s select committee on the Benghazi terrorist attack, which Mr. Gowdy chairs, has responded to points raised in my weekend column.
In the column, I expressed surprise and disappointment that, while Chairman Gowdy by his own account learned about Secretary of State Clinton’s use of private email over six months ago, the committee took no meaningful responsive action: It did not reveal that alarming information publicly, issue subpoenas for those emails, or issue preservation letters to the relevant telecommunication service providers to retain records.
The source close to Gowdy and the committee reports that the State Department only recently told the committee that Secretary Clinton exclusively used personal email. The source says that once the committee learned that State never had her emails to begin with, “the circumstances changed hence the subpoena directly to her.” The source adds that this is why Chairman Gowdy, in a Sunday appearance on Face the Nation, said he’s lost confidence in the State Department.
This is what I told the journalist who asked for my reaction:
Chairman Gowdy says he is running the committee like a prosecutor conducting a meticulous investigation. When a prosecutor learns that a subject of his investigation is using private email, he issues a subpoena forthwith. From the investigator’s standpoint, whether the use of private email is occasional or exclusive does not affect his responsibility — his job is to obtain the evidence.
I’m relieved to hear that Chairman Gowdy has lost confidence in the State Department, but that begs the question why he had confidence in the first place. State has a history of withholding and misrepresenting information about Benghazi. In fact, [as I noted in my column,] the week Chairman Gowdy held his first Benghazi hearing, a witness [whom the committee did not call at the hearing] came forward to say that he’d seen Secretary Clinton’s top aides removing documents from what was supposed to be disclosed to Clinton’s hand-picked Accountability Review Board.
So if the chairman continued to have confidence in the State Department’s transparency in this particular matter, that is baffling. But that is almost beside the point. The State Department is a subject of the investigation that Mr. Gowdy says he is conducting like a meticulous prosecutor. A prosecutor does not rely on the good graces of the subjects of his investigation to produce evidence. He uses his subpoena power.