Benghazi committee requests interview with Hillary Clinton
The House Benghazi Select Committee is asking Hillary Clinton to appear for a "transcribed interview" that would cover her use of a private email and and server for State Department business.
The chairman of the committee, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-South Carolina, sent the request in a letter Tuesday to Hillary Clinton's attorney, David Kendall. Gowdy said in the letter that the committee wanted to hear from Clinton no later than May 1.
The transcribed interview Gowdy would, Gowdy suggested, help the committee "to better understand decisions the Secretary made relevant to the creation, maintenance, retention, and ultimately deletion of public records." At the same time, Gowdy said in the letter to Kendal that "a transcribed interview would best protect Secretary Clinton's privacy, the security of the information queried, and the public's interest in ensuring this Committee has all information needed."
Earlier this month, the committee asked Clinton to turn over her personal server by Apr. 3 to the State Department's inspector general, a third party deemed by Gowdy to be appropriately "neutral, detached and independent."
But on Friday, Kendall declined, saying in a letter to the committee that handing over the server would be pointless, given that "no emails ... reside on the server or on any backup systems associated with the server." In fact, according to Kendall, the server now deletes all of her personal emails every 60 days.
The committee still hopes Clinton will turn over the server and has demanded that the server and equipment must be preserved, since they hope "to recover electronic information notwithstanding whether it has been "deleted" or overwritten."