GOP lawmaker: Clinton withholding emails is ‘absolutely unacceptable’

A Republican member of the House Select Committee on Benghazi chastised Hillary Clinton for not handing over part or all of 15 emails from her private email server to the State Department.

“The fact that Clinton withheld information that could help this committee uncover all of the facts about what happened to cause the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi is absolutely unacceptable,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kansas) said in a statement Friday night.

The State Department this week confirmed it did not possess 15 emails Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal turned over to the House panel earlier this month.

{mosads}The batch of roughly 60 memos was separate from the 30,000 emails from Clinton’s private server that she gave her former agency earlier this year. 

The missing memos all predate the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks on the diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans.

Pompeo said the discovery shows that Clinton, a 2016 presidential candidate, “did not want the American people to know the truth.” 

“If Sidney Blumenthal had not retained copies of these documents and provided them to the committee, Americans would never have known about the scope of the private, unvetted intelligence that Clinton was receiving about conditions on the ground in Libya,” he said. “We now do.”

Pompeo said the development “begs the question of what other information Clinton did not provide in response to our Congressional inquiry, and confirms the need for a neutral, independent, third party to be given access to Clinton’s private, non-government server that provided the sole email communications link to her during her time as Secretary of State.”

The State Department said Friday it wouldn’t investigate why it didn’t receive the 15 work-related emails from Clinton.