Gowdy: Hillary's email server shows high 'level of concealment'
By Barbara Boland • 8/16/15 2:39 PM
Hillary Clinton finally surrendering her server "validates" the House Select Committee on Benghazi's March request that she do, and the fact that she scrubbed it clean first shows "a higher level of concealment," committee Chairman Trey Gowdy said Sunday.
"I don't know whether you do yoga or not — I don't, so I don't have any yoga emails," said Gowdy about Hillary's claim that most of the emails scrubbed clean from her server were about yoga and her daughter's wedding. "But the greater steps that you take to clean something or delete something — that's a higher level of concealment, that's a higher level of consciousness of concealment."
"So your viewers have to ask themselves to what lengths would they go to delete a yoga email," said Gowdy on "Fox News Sunday." "Would they call in forensic experts to triple wash a server so they could get rid of bridesmaids' emails or yoga practice emails? Of course not."
Gowdy said "the more energy [Hillary] put into cleansing or wiping the server clean, I think your viewers should take or infer from that perhaps there was something on there she really didn't want us to see."
"Once it was determined that ... more than classified, compartmented information was on [Hillary's] server, the FBI then had jurisdiction," Gowdy explained. "I wish she had done this in March. We would be further down the road" with the investigation.
"But she swore she would never turn the server over again and I guess she didn't," said Gowdy. "It was taken — it wasn't turned over, it was taken."
Gowdy said he views the FBI as "apolitical" and that they will investigate wherever the evidence takes them. He added that he hopes the FBI turns the server over to the inspector general when they are through with their investigation.
"Why is all of this your business? What does this have to do with investigating what happened around Benghazi?" questioned host Chris Wallace.
"Probably not much of anything," replied Gowdy. "It was just us that determined this unique email arrangement that she had with herself. We have interviewed three dozen witnesses not a single one of them is named Clinton."
Gowdy claimed that his focus is on "the four murdered Americans in Benghazi" but that before he can write "the final, definitive accounting of that I have to make sure that the public record is complete."
"All of this started with my desire to get her emails, and [the] emails of her top aides," said Gowdy. "Thanks to frankly some folks in your line of work, who did good journalistic investigation, and thanks in part I guess to my colleagues on the committee, we have determined that there's a lot more to her email story than just the completeness of the record."
He then reiterated that he is only interested in "doing a good job for the four murdered Americans and their families."
Wallace then played a clip of Hillary Clinton in Iowa saying she won't get "down in the mud" with Republicans investigating Benghazi.
"I won't play politics with national security ... I won't pretend that this is anything other than what it is, the same old partisan games we've seen so many times before," said Clinton in the clip.
"I get that she's frustrated; her poll numbers are tanking; folks who never thought about getting in the race are getting in the race," responded Gowdy. "But she need not blame House Republicans for having her own personal server, for exclusively using private email, for telling us the Sidney Blumenthal emails were unsolicited and then we later find out that they were not. For telling us there was no classified information and we later find out that there was. For telling us the public record was complete and then we find 15 emails she never turned over to the State Department.
"I get that she's frustrated," Gowdy repeated. "Sometimes when people are frustrated they look in the mirror and engage in a little bit of self-reflection and then sometimes they lash out and blame nonexistent right-wing conspiracies, and apparently she's chosen to do the latter."
Gowdy continued to insist that the investigation was not political, despite a negative commercial about Hillary's email server put out by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
"Again, I will just tell you this: Had it not been for this unusual email arrangement that she had with herself, you and I would not be talking this morning," said Gowdy, who charged that Wallace doesn't know the name of a single other person interviewed by the committee nor has he seen the other documents the committee has acquired.
"We are trying to run this investigation the way that serious investigations are run," said Gowdy.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/gowdy-hillarys-email-server-shows-high-level-of-concealment/article/2570286
