WASHINGTON – It looks like Hillary Clinton has been caught red-handed telling a lie, after claiming in an interview that she had not received a subpoena for her emails.
On Wednesday, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi, released the subpoena he sent to the former secretary of state on March 4, 2015.
The congressman publicly displayed the subpoena just one day after Clinton told CNN she never received one.
Gowdy did it “in response to her inaccurate claim she had not been subpoenaed,” according to a statement released by the committee on Wednesday.
The statement said, “The committee subpoenaed Clinton directly after it became aware of her exclusive use of personal email and a server and that the State Department was not the custodian of Clinton’s official record.”
“The committee has issued several subpoenas, but I have not sought to make them public,” said Gowdy. “I would not make this one public now, but after Secretary Clinton falsely claimed the committee did not subpoena her, I have no choice in order to correct the inaccuracy. The committee immediately subpoenaed Clinton personally after learning the full extent of her unusual email arrangement with herself, and would have done so earlier if the State Department or Clinton had been forthcoming that State did not maintain custody of her records and only Secretary Clinton herself had her records when Congress first requested them.
“The fact remains, despite when this subpoena was issued, Secretary Clinton had a statutory duty to preserve records from her entire time in office, and she had a legal duty to cooperate with and tell the truth to congressional investigators requesting her records going back to September of 2012,” he continued. “Yet despite direct congressional inquiry, she refused to inform the public of her unusual email arrangement. This information only came to light because of a Select Committee request, not a voluntary decision to turn over records almost two years after leaving office, records which always should have been in State’s custody.
“Moreover, the timing of the Secretary’s decision to delete and attempt to permanently destroy emails is curious at best. The Secretary left office in February of 2013. By her own admission she did not delete or destroy emails until the fall of 2014, well after this Committee had been actively engaged in securing her emails from the Department of State. For 20 months, it was not too burdensome or cumbersome for the Secretary to house records on her personal server but mysteriously in the fall of 2014 she decided to delete and attempt to permanently destroy those same records,” concluded Gowdy.
The subpoena can be seen here.
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