Republican members of the House Select Committee on Benghazi say they don’t expect Hillary Clinton’s emails to be released anytime soon, predicting the likely presidential candidate will try to hold up the process.
“I think they’re going to drag their feet long enough that she’ll announce for the presidency, and then it’ll become, ‘Oh, this is just a political thing,’ ” Rep. Lynn Westmoreland (R-Ga.) said Thursday during an interview with Fox Business News’ “Lou Dobbs Tonight.”
{mosads}“We don’t know how many emails there were. They’re going to give us a bunch of them, but that doesn’t mean it’s all of them,” Westmoreland said. “This is about her actions for four years, having two personal email accounts and not putting it on the State [email server], as required by law.”
Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), another panel member, chided Clinton for tweeting late Wednesday night that she wanted to make her emails public.
“To hear that she has now tweeted saying she wants the American people to see them is the height of hypocrisy. She can release them herself. They are on her own personal email server. She can have them to the American people in the next 20 minutes,” he said during an interview with Fox News’ “On the Record.”
Together, their comments signal that Republicans plan to keep banging the drum over Clinton’s personal email accounts, just at the 2016 race for the White House gets underway.
Democrats are defending Clinton in the email controversy. On Thursday, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), another member of the select panel, said had Clinton “provided 55,000 pages of emails” to the State Department last year and urged those documents be released to the public as soon as possible to silence the Benghazi “conspiracy theorists.”
A State Department spokeswoman said officials would review Clinton’s emails “as quickly as possible” while going through the “normal process” for releasing emails from top officials.
“Given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete,” Marie Harf said.
Westmoreland said there is still a “very good chance” that Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) will call Clinton in to testify before the panel.
“What the chairman is trying to do is just to have her in one time and get all the information, as any good attorney … would want to do is to have all the information before you bring the witness in. And that’s what Chairman Gowdy wanted to do so she wouldn’t have to make two trips,” he said.