With just eight weeks to go before Election Day, congressional Republicans are seizing what could be their last chance to tie up loose ends from a year-long investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails.
For the third time in less than a week, the House Oversight Committee held a public hearing Tuesday to examine aspects of the case.
Republicans lawmakers kicked off the session by dismissing a pair of witnesses who pleaded their Fifth Amendment rights and refused to answer questions.
At a separate hearing Monday, majority members blasted FBI Director James Comey and his staff for refusing to show up at a closed-door briefing about classified materials that Rep. Jason Chaffetz had requested last week.
And on Thursday, a high-ranking State Department official told the Oversight Committee that it would be “physically impossible” for his agency to hand over all of Clinton’s emails by November.
The stonewalling has only served to pique Republican interest in undisclosed details about the FBI’s probe and the State Department’s subsequent handling of the 15,000 deleted emails recovered by investigators.
As the possibility of a potential Clinton presidency looms ahead, GOP lawmakers may be running out of time to coerce answers out of the current administration.
Chaffetz, who chairs the Oversight Committee, abruptly issued a subpoena Monday during an exchange with Jason Herring, an FBI representative, after Herring suggested members of Congress wait for the Freedom of Information Act process to unfold in order to obtain notes from the Clinton email probe.
The Oversight Committee chairman also vowed to pursue testimony from Bryan Pagliano, the information technology aide who built the server Clinton used during most of her tenure, when Pagliano failed to appear before the panel Tuesday despite receiving a subpoena to do so.
Although the FBI released 58 pages of notes from its investigation earlier this month — including an 11-page summary of its interview with Clinton — the bureau withheld thousands of additional pages of findings from both the public and Congress.
The evidence presented to lawmakers so far has been a carefully-crafted overview of the investigation, omitting details such as the existence of a second immunity deal granted by the Justice Department in the course of its probe.
Pagliano’s immunity agreement had already been made disclosed.
But the deal extended to Paul Combetta, a technician at the firm tapped to manage Clinton’s network after she left the State Department, was unknown to Congress and the public until the New York Times reported it last week.
Combetta, a Platte River Networks employee, appeared at the oversight hearing Tuesday and declined to answer questions.
Other committees are digging into the murky details of the Clinton email controversy as well.
Rep. Lamar Smith, chairman of the House Science Committee, blasted Platte River on Monday along with two other technology companies involved in managing Clinton’s emails after the firms refused to provide documents requested by his committee under subpoena.
Smith’s committee is examining the steps Clinton and her technology team took to secure records that contained classified material.
Later this month, Comey is set to appear before the House Judiciary Committee for an annual hearing on oversight of the FBI.
Comey is expected to face questions about the Clinton email controversy.
