In the wake of revelations about Hillary Clinton’s emails being kept from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) is demanding answers.
Gowdy, who chairs the committee, wants to know whether it was the State Department or Hillary Clinton herself who withheld 60 Libya-related emails between the former secretary of state and ally Sidney Blumenthal from the House panel, according to Politico.
“Once again, the Benghazi Committee uncovers information that should already be part of the public record but was not made available to the American people or congressional investigators,” Gowdy declared in a statement Monday. “These emails should have been part of the public record when Secretary Clinton left office and at a bare minimum included when the State Department released Clinton’s self-selected records on Libya.”
The freshly-revealed correspondences were not captured in the 300 emails given to the select committee by the State Department last year despite the fact that they directly referenced the subject of Libya. They were, however, dug up when Blumenthal provided his electronic correspondences with Clinton about a week ago.
In some of the emails, Blumenthal — who at the time was working as an advisor for the Clinton Foundation and in talks about a business venture in Libya — forwarded Libyan intelligence along to Clinton that he was receiving from an ex-CIA official.
According to the panel, the email correspondence “raises fresh questions about whether Clinton’s self-selected record is complete.” Investigators were alluding, of course, to the private email system that Hillary Clinton exclusively used while at the State Department, the server for which she has since wiped clean.
Panel Democrats like ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings (Md.) and Clinton allies like Media Matters founder David Brock are, however, striking back at Gowdy for releasing the Blumenthal emails without providing a transcript of his full deposition. Cummings insisted that such a recording would put the messages “in proper context.”
Now, Gowdy’s attention is focused on determining who ensured that the select emails were left out from Hillary Clinton’s 300 messages — the State Department or Clinton. The committee has, as such, asked State to “provide the House their copies of these emails by the end of the day, if they have them.”
The absence of such copies will indicate that it was likely Clinton who did the concealing.
“We’re working through that right now to determine if there are emails in that batch that we either didn’t have or may have not provided,” State spokesman John Kirby explained of the matter Monday.
Gowdy’s persistence and fervor is unsurprising, as the committee chair has been consistently ruthless in his pursuit of Clinton and her emails.
