A pair of Republican committee chairs filed a letter with the Justice Department Monday requesting an investigation into whether Hillary Clinton committed perjury last fall when she repeated under oath talking points about her emails that have since been debunked by the FBI.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said in a letter to a U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia that evidence made public by FBI Director James Comey “appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony.”
Clinton had stated under oath before the House Select Committee on Benghazi that she had turned over all her work-related emails and that she had never sent or received anything marked classified, both statements that were exposed as falsehoods by Comey last week.
Comey told Chaffetz in a hearing Thursday that his team had not looked into possible perjury by Clinton because his agency had not received a criminal referral from Congress.
Rep. Elijah Cummings, ranking Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said the letter was just a result of Republicans’ frustration with the outcome of the FBI investigation.
“There is absolutely no credible evidence that anyone at the FBI did anything wrong in this investigation, that they pulled any punches, or that they were improperly influenced by anyone outside the agency,” Cummings said. “Republicans are now squandering even more taxpayer dollars in a desperate attempt to keep this issue alive and bring down Secretary Clinton’s poll numbers ahead of the election.”
