The Republican congressman leading the House investigation into the terror attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi said the House may vote to subpoena Hillary Clinton’s emails housed on her private home server.
Rep. Trey Gowdy said he hopes “it doesn’t get to that point,” but left the door open to action by the full House to compel Clinton to hand over her private email server to an independent, third-party auditor.
“The House as an institution may be forced to go to court to get access to that,” Gowdy said Sunday on “Fox News Sunday.”
But Gowdy presented a subpoena as a final recourse if Clinton doesn’t give in to calls for her to hand over her private email server to a third party who would determine what emails from her time as secretary of state should become publicly available.
Clinton used her own personal email address throughout her time as secretary of state and she and her aides decided which emails to hand over to the State Department for public records. Her aides have turned in about 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department.
Clinton said earlier this week at a press conference that her server “will remain private.”
Gowdy is trying to obtain emails linked to Clinton’s handling of the Benghazi attacks and said that “there are lots of ways to motivate people.”
“One of them is public pressure,” he said. “If the public believes that it is reasonable for her to turn over that server which contains public information to a neutrally detached arbiter, then she’ll be forced to do so.”
He added that while the House “has no business” looking at her personal emails, “she doesn’t get to decide what is purely personal and what is public.”