Rep. Trey Gowdy, chairman of the House Select Committee on Benghazi,
told radio host Hugh Hewitt that he wants to have "two conversations" with Hillary Clinton — one about her actions surrounding the 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Libya and the other on her "email arrangements."
Clinton has never refused to appear before his committee, but he does not want to schedule a hearing until he has all the relevant material. "I'd be a really lousy lawyer if I use my one opportunity to talk to a witness before I had all the emails and other documents," said Gowdy.
And, he told Hewitt, he would use a subpoena if it comes "to the point of formal legal process," though "I hope it would not." Gowdy has asked that Clinton respond to Congress by May 1.
Clinton's lawyer David Kendall made clear that Clinton — a former first lady, senator, secretary of state and now the presumptive Democratic nominee for president in 2016 — would not hand over her private email server.
Gowdy said his select committee does not have the authority to subpoena the server, but that the full House probably does.
"The House as an entity, it's an open legal question, but most experts believe that the House could subpoena that server" to have it examined by a neutral arbiter, said Gowdy.
The
select committee was given documents this week by the Central Intelligence Agency that had not been made previously available to other congressional panels looking into the Libya attacks, according to
Politico.
The committee wants the National Security Agency to give it recordings of conversations Clinton had on Sept. 11, 2012, with Gregory Hicks, then deputy chief of mission in Libya. "There are lots of things that exist that no other committee of Congress either had access to or asked for," Gowdy said.
Gowdy told Hewitt that he intended to interview attorney Cheryl Mills, who served as the State Department's chief of staff during Clinton's tenure. He would also interview Clinton's senior aide Huma Abedin and former Deputy CIA Director Michael Morell.
The existence of
Clinton's private email account became widely known after hackers released emails they purloined from her confidante Sidney Blumenthal.
Gowdy said he would first want to take confidential testimony from State Department and CIA personnel. "Then we are moving into the people who are more well-known, the Susan Rices, the Ben Rhodes, and yes, you can include Sidney Blumenthal," he told Hewitt.
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