Democrats on the House select committee investigating the Benghazi attacks are asking the panel’s GOP chairman to rescind a subpoena for emails from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private account, calling the move “completely unnecessary and unfounded.”
“We urge you to withdraw the ill-considered subpoena — whose issuance to a cooperating witness served only to highlight the increasingly partisan nature of the Committee’s focus — and to immediately publish the Secretary’s emails in their entirety, as she has requested,” the five lawmakers said Friday in a letter to Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.).
“Allowing these emails to be made public will help clear up any misperceptions and will also help return the Committee to its original purpose, investigating the tragic events in Benghazi, rather than allowing it to become a surrogate for the Republican National Committee,” the Democrats added.
Panel Democrats concluded their six-page missive by urging Gowdy to retract the subpoena, fulfill an earlier pledge he made to have Clinton appear within 30 days to discuss if all documents relevant to that deadly assault in Libya have been turned over, and to make the former envoy’s messages available to the public.
The document is the latest move in a week of rancorous and partisan finger-pointing that began after The New York Times revealed that Clinton relied solely on a personal email account while serving as secretary of State.
The select committee issued a subpoena on Tuesday for “all communications of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton related to Libya and to the State Department for other individuals who have information pertinent to the investigation,” panel spokesman Jamal Ware said in a statement.
Republicans have also seized on reports that Clinton used a personal server registered to her home in New York to host the email.
On Thursday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) asked the State Department to open an independent investigation into whether she broke the law.
Democrats have moved quickly to defend Clinton, their party’s presumptive presidential nominee in 2016.
Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), a member of the select panel, on Thursday 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, adding that given the “sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete.”