http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/benghazi-committee-wont-release-hillary-clinton-emails-for-now/article/2561005?utm_content=buffer448a8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=bufferBenghazi committee won't release Hillary Clinton emails for now
BY REBECCA BERG | MARCH 3, 2015 | 5:56 PM
The chairman of the House committee investigating the State Department's response to Benghazi said Tuesday he has no plans to publicly release emails sent by Hillary Clinton using a personal account during her tenure as secretary of state.
"We have not produced information selectively," Rep. Trey Gowdy, the committee's chairman, told reporters. "In my judgment, it runs counter to a serious investigation to do so."
A New York Times report Monday revealed that Gowdy's committee discovered that Clinton corresponded exclusively with personal email accounts while acting as secretary of state, a practice that is both unusual and runs afoul of rules requiring officials to use government accounts.
A spokesman for Clinton defended the practice to the New York Times, saying Clinton complied with the "letter and spirit of the rules" and had assumed correspondences with other U.S. government officials would be retained anyway.
Clinton provided 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department two months ago, according to the report, selected by her aides from a larger cache.
But Gowdy said Tuesday that his committee plans to exhaust all options to obtain all of Clinton's emails pertaining to Benghazi. Today, the committee sent letters to Clinton and her attorneys requesting that all records be preserved, Gowdy said.
"The committee is going to have to go to her, and her attorneys, and her email providers to ensure we have access to everything the American people are entitled to know," Gowdy said.
But because the entirety of Clinton's emails are in her possession, not archived with the State Department, Gowdy conceded his committee might be unable to confirm that Clinton has provided all relevant documents to Congress.
"The best you can do is put someone who has access to the information under oath and have him or her affirm that it has been a complete production," Gowdy said.
Gowdy's committee discovered last summer that Clinton corresponded exclusively using two personal email accounts, and her emails were not archived with the State Department as is required by National Archives and Records Administration rules. By using a personal account to conduct official business, Clinton's emails were not subject to records requests by Congress or the public, and might have made the emails susceptible to security breaches.
"You do not need to have a law degree to understand how troubling this is," Gowdy said.
The revelation has sparked a potential political problem for Clinton as she nears the launch of her presidential campaign, creating an opening for Republicans to question her transparency as secretary of state.
"Transparency matters," former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush tweeted Monday. "Unclassified @HillaryClinton emails should be released."
But the discovery also adds a wrinkle to the ongoing congressional investigation by Gowdy's committee into whether the State Department and Clinton responded appropriately to the terror attacks in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012.
The attacks have been investigated previously by other congressional committees, including by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, before which Clinton testified in January 2013 in back-to-back hearings.
But the State Department did not turn over Clinton's personal emails during those previous investigations, Gowdy said.
"The State Department never came forward with this information, which clearly should have been revealed to other committees reviewing Benghazi," Gowdy said, "making any claim of a definitive report impossible."
