Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus on Saturday slammed former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for purging her private server of all the emails during her four years as the nation's top diplomat.
"Even Nixon didn't destroy the tapes," Priebus said, referencing the Watergate scandal that led to the Republican president's resignation in 1974.
"It's imperative an independent third party review the server immediately," the chairman added. "Unless Mrs. Clinton went to extreme lengths to wipe this server, there are ways to recover this data."
Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican who heads the committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attacks, said Friday that Clinton had failed to produce any new documents and had refused to turn over the server to a third party for an independent review.
Gowdy had made the requests in a subpoena to Clinton. The former secretary had received a two-week extension from the committee to comply with the subpoena, he said.
As a result, "It is clear Congress will need to speak with the former secretary about her email arrangement and the decision to permanently delete those emails," Gowdy said.
Clinton's attorney, David Kendall, said that the chairman needed to seek the emails from the State Department, which is "uniquely positioned to make available any documents responsive to your requests.
"The Department of State is therefore in possession of all Secretary Clinton's work-related emails from the [personal email] account,"
Kendall wrote in a six-page letter released Friday.
Secretary of State John Kerry, who succeeded Clinton in 2013, ordered the agency's inspector general to examine its practices in light of the revelations, officials said Friday.
The review is "critical to preserve a full and complete record of American foreign policy," Kerry said in a letter calling for the evaluation.
State Department spokesman Jeff Rathke said, however, that the review would not be specific to Clinton — and that it would include the archiving of emails, along with all requests from congressional inquiries and through the Freedom of Information Act.
Clinton is considering a run for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016.
But Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the Benghazi committee's top Democrat, said the letter from Clinton's attorney "confirms what we all knew."
That was, he said, "that Secretary Clinton already produced her official records to the State Department, that she did not keep her personal emails, and that the Select Committee has already obtained her emails relating to the attacks in Benghazi.
"It is time for the committee to stop this political charade and instead make these documents public and schedule Secretary Clinton's public testimony now," Cummings said.
But another GOP committee member, Rep. Mike Pompeo of Kansas, told
Fox News on Saturday that panel members still hoped to get access to Clinton's server "to make sure that all of the relevant e-mails are in the possession of the United States government."
The Benghazi attacks killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans, including two former Navy SEALs.
In his statement, Priebus said that it appeared that "Clinton went above and beyond to eliminate email traffic as Secretary of State.
"There isn’t a separate set of rules the Clintons can choose to play by," he added. "It's time they be held accountable."
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.