House Speaker John Boehner on Sunday accused former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton of lying about the email scandal that is hounding her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.
“She is not telling the truth. She had an obligation to turn these e-mails over,” Mr. Boehner, Ohio Republican, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“Our committees asked for her emails going back to 2012, and we’ve been rolled and rolled and held off and held off now for over three years,” he said. “The emails need to come forward.”
He said that he wouldn’t rule out issuing another subpoena for Mrs. Clinton to turn over the private email server in her home in Chappaqua, New York, that hosted her email account as secretary of state.
Mrs. Clinton, the front-runner for the Democratic nomination, said in a national TV interview last week that she was never subpoenaed to turn over her emails from her tenure as America’s top diplomat, when she exclusively used a private email account to conduct official business and then, years later, deleted about half of the messages rather than turn them over to the Department of State.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi isseud a subpoenaed March 4 to Mrs. Clinton demanding that she turn over the emails.
Her campaign has stated that Mrs. Clinton meant to say that she was not subpoenaed until after she turned over about half the emails in December. That’s when she gave the Department of State roughly 30,000 messages — which filled 55,000 pages — that she deemed official business and then deleted the rest.
At some point, she also wiped clean the server, permanently erasing all the messages.
“Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation,” Mrs. Clinton said in the CNN interview. “Now, I didn’t have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me because I knew the vast majority of everything that was official already was in the State Department system.”
Mr. Boehner said that not only was Mrs. Clinton dishonest about the subpoena, but she also didn’t tell the truth about her responsibility to give the Department of State all of her emails from her time in office.
He said that her emails are vital to the committee, which is investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
“She wants this investigation over, she wants this all to be cleaned up, but the fact is, it’s not going to be cleaned up until they get the emails. I would hope they would turn them over or the State Department would go after the server,” said Mr. Boehner.
He said the Department of State’s inspector general should be trying to seize the server to try to recover all of Mrs. Clinton’s emails.
“Congress doesn’t want the server,” he said. “The State Department I.G. is the appropriate group of people to go through these e-mails, to make those determinations.”
• S.A. Miller can be reached at smiller@washingtontimes.com.
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