Hillary Clinton’s emails were under not just one, but two subpoenas, Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on Benghazi, said in an interview Wednesday evening.
Subpoenas for Clinton’s emails have become a point of contention after the former secretary of state said in an interview with CNN on Tuesday that she “never had a subpoena” for her emails.
Gowdy responded to that claim earlier on Wednesday with a copy of a March 4 subpoena for the emails she sent exclusively from her private email account as secretary of state. The Clinton camp responded to that by saying that during the interview, Clinton was answering a question about whether she was under subpoena when she decided to delete her emails and scrub the private server she kept them on — a move that occurred sometime after November 2014.
Gowdy issued another volley, calling that rebuttal into question in an interview on the “Hugh Hewitt Show” on Wednesday.
“It’s also a fact that there was a subpoena in existence from another Congressional committee far before that one. So there are two subpoenas. There are letters from Congress. And there’s a statutory obligation to her to preserve public records,” Gowdy said.
Gowdy was referencing an Aug. 1, 2013, subpoena that the House Oversight Committee sent to the State Department for records related to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.
That subpoena has received little attention, but Gowdy says it is significant and disproves Clinton’s claim that her records were not being sought when she decided to erase them.
As The Washington Examiner’s Byron York laid out in an article in March, the Aug. 2013 subpoena was in effect until the end of 2014.
Gowdy said that the Clinton team will likely claim that since the State Department did not have Clinton’s emails at that time, they were not under that specific subpoena. But he said that argument, if the Clinton camp makes it, holds no water.
“Clearly her emails were covered by that subpoena or the Department of State never would have given them to us,” Gowdy said, explaining that the Aug. 2013 subpoena was what led the State Department to turn over eight Clinton emails to his committee last year.
Handing over those emails was what first indicated to the committee that Clinton may have used a private email account exclusively during her tenure.
Gowdy also disputed Clinton’s claim that she did not violate any law or regulation governing her use of the private email account or her failure to turn them over to the State Department when she left office in Feb. 2013.
“Everything I did was permitted,” Clinton said on Tuesday. “There was no law. There was no regulation. There was nothing that did not give me the full authority to decide how I was going to communicate.”
Gowdy said on Wednesday: “Whether it’s a subpoena in place, or whether it’s a statute in place, or whether it’s a congressional investigation in place, you can’t delete and wipe out public records.”
The Obama administration had issued a directive requiring all federal officials to use government email accounts. Federal regulations on the books since 2009 also require federal employees to make their records available to the agencies they work for. Gowdy says that Clinton only did that after his committee began investigating, and even then, she only did so nearly two years after leaving office.
LISTEN:
