RNC on Clinton: ‘Even Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes’
By Jesse Byrnes
The Hill
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus blasted Hillary Clinton on Saturday for wiping her server and permanently deleting all emails.
“Even Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes,” Priebus said in a statement.
Clinton’s lawyer informed the House Select Committee investigating Benghazi on Friday that Clinton no longer had copies of any emails from her four-year tenure as secretary of State, ending in 2013.
Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the committee, said in a statement Friday that “Clinton unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server.”
Gowdy, whose committee had subpoenaed the server earlier this month, charged that Clinton apparently decided to delete her emails after Oct. 28, 2014, when the State Department first asked her to turn over public records.
Clinton has turned over roughly 55,000 pages of documents to the State Department, though Republicans have have seized her admission this month that her aides deleted more than 30,000 “personal” emails.
Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, reportedly told House investigators that after aides determined which emails were private and which were government-related, an account setting was changed to only save emails sent in the past 60 days, adding the setting was changed after she responded to the records request.
“Thus, there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com emails from Secretary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State on the server for any review, even if such review were appropriate or legally authorized,” Kendall said in a letter to Gowdy’s committee, according to The New York Times.
Still, Republicans are likely to keep up their attacks on Clinton over the emails heading into her official declaration of a 2016 presidential campaign, which is expected in weeks.
Priebus on Saturday echoed calls from Republican lawmakers for Clinton to turn over her server.
“It’s imperative an independent third party review the server immediately. Unless Mrs. Clinton went to extreme lengths to wipe this server, there are ways to recover this data,” Priebus said.