Last week, it was revealed that rumored 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton used her private email for government business during her four years as Secretary of State. The House Committee investigating the September 11, 2012, terrorist attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, issued subpoenas on Wednesday for all of Clinton’s emails related to Libya.
On Sunday, the chairman of the Benghazi Committee, Republican Representative Trey Gowdy, said that although Clinton provided 50,000 pages of emails, documentation from her trip to Libya following the terrorist attacks was not included.
Gowdy appeared on CBS’s Face the Nation with Bob Schieffer on Sunday, and he confirmed that there were “huge gaps” in the email records that were given to the Benghazi Committee.
Gowdy said that while Clinton’s emails are still under investigation, there would be no “selective releases” of the messages. “If she wants to release all of them, with the emphasis being on the word all, she’s welcome to do that. I can’t stop her from doing it,” Gowdy said. “But serious investigations don’t make selective releases.”
When asked about any significant gaps in the emails Clinton turned over to the Committee, Gowdy said that there were several “huge gaps” that raise questions about Clinton’s credibility.
“There are gaps of months and months and months,” Gowdy said. “And if you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, she has sunglasses on and she has her handheld device in her hand, we have no e-mails from that day. In fact, we have no e-mails from that trip.”
Gowdy said that it shouldn’t be up to Clinton to decide “what is a public record and what’s not.” He explained that he ultimately blames the State Department for allowing the arrangement, and for not doing anything about it until they received a request from the House Committee on Benghazi.
In an interview with CBS News on Saturday, President Obama said he learned of Clinton’s use of private email at “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”
On Monday, the Associated Press reported that while Obama was aware that Clinton conducted business using a private email account, he was not aware that she was using a private server to send those emails.
Josh Earnest, a spokesman for the White House, confirmed that Obama exchanged emails with Clinton using her private email address. “The president — as I think many people expected — did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with the secretary of state,” Earnest said.
March 12, 2015: UPDATE: Fact Check: Holes in Hillary’s Email Story
