Hillary Clinton turned her private email server over to the Justice Department on Tuesday because she is “out of options,” Republican National Committee chairman Reince Priebus asserted in a statement.
Clinton directed her campaign team to “give her email server that was used during her tenure as [Secretary of State] to the Department of Justice, as well as a thumb drive containing copies of her emails already provided to the State Department,” her spokesman Nick Merrill said, according to CNN.
The announcement came just after news broke that the Intelligence Community inspector general recently found that two emails that were sent across Clinton’s email server contained “Top Secret” information.
Clinton has said maintained that she did not send or receive classified documents on the server, which hosted a private email domain that she and several aides used during her tenure at State. She has also stated that she would not relinquish her server, despite calls from Republican lawmakers to turn it over to an independent third-party.
Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, will also hand over three thumb drives which contain Clinton’s emails. The State Department had allowed the Washington D.C.-based lawyer to maintain possession of the devices, but the Justice Department overrode that decision, likely because of security concerns.
“If Hillary Clinton believed in honesty and transparency, she would have turned over her secret server months ago to an independent arbiter, not as a last resort and to the Obama Justice Department,” Priebus said in his statement, adding that if she had really been concerned about transparency “she would never have had a secret server in the first place.”
“All this means is that Hillary Clinton, in the face of FBI scrutiny, has decided she has run out of options. She knows she did something wrong and has run out of ways to cover it up,” Priebus continued.
“The majority of Americans don’t trust her, and they’re right. She put our national security at risk for selfish reasons. She couldn’t be trusted at the State Department; she certainly can’t be trusted in the Oval Office.”
In a separate statement, Trey Gowdy, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, hammered Clinton over her claim that she used the private server and a personal email account “out of convenience.”
“It may have been convenient for her, but it has been troubling at multiple levels for the rest of the country,” Gowdy said. “Congress, the media, the public, private litigants and FOIA requestors were denied access to public documents, and recently the Inspectors General for two separate Executive Branch entities expressed concern about the possible exposure of classified material as a direct result of her decision to eschew the email rules applicable to everyone else and create her own.”