House Republicans: Hillary Clinton committed perjury in emails testimony
Two Republican committee chairmen on Capitol Hill are alleging that Hillary Clinton perjured herself during testimony to Congress last October when discussing her use of private email servers when she served as secretary of state.
In a letter sent to the Department of Justice on Monday, House Judiciary Chairman Bob Goodlatte, R-Virginia, and Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, said that Clinton's testimony before the House Select Committee on Benghazi contradicts the FBI's findings from its investigation into her private email servers.
"The evidence collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during its investigation of Secretary Clinton's use of a personal email system during her time as Secretary of State appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony," they wrote.
They said that the testimony that needs to be reviewed revolves around whether Clinton sent or received emails that were marked classified at the time; whether her attorneys reviewed each of the emails on her personal email system; whether there was more than one email server; and whether she provided all of her work-related emails to the State Department.
The two Republicans said that in her testimony before the Benghazi panel on October 22, 2015, Clinton claimed that she didn't send or receive emails that were marked classified at the time. FBI Director James Comey, however, recently told Congress that there were three documents on an email server that were marked confidential. The State Department then said that some of those classification marking were the result of human error and didn't need to be on them.
They also said that Clinton claimed in her testimony that her lawyers reviewed all of her emails, but Comey told Congress in early July that they didn't individually review them. During her testimony, Goodlatte and Chaffetz said that Clinton said she only used one private email server, but the FBI found that there were "multiple devices." The two Republicans also said that Clinton did not provide all of her work-related emails to the Justice Department as she had testified.
On Tuesday afternoon, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Maryland, the ranking member on the House Select Committee on Benghazi and the ranking member on the Oversight Committee, blasted his Republican counterparts and said they were only making this effort to cause a distraction from Donald Trump.
"The FBI already determined unanimously that there is insufficient evidence of criminal wrongdoing. Republicans are now investigating the investigator in a desperate attempt to resuscitate this issue, keep it in the headlines, and distract from Donald Trump's sagging poll numbers," he said in a statement.
The GOP letter was in response to another letter the Justice Department had sent them last week that said the department would "take appropriate action as necessary" to investigate their request.
In early July, Comey detailed the findings of the FBI investigation and said that it would recommend that the Justice Department not bring charges against Clinton for her use of private email servers, which Attorney General Loretta Lynch agreed with.