Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have broken the law when it comes to her emails if it turns out she withheld them from congressional investigators after a subpoena was issued, Rep. Darrell Issa said Sunday.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi has subpoenaed all of Clinton's emails during her tenure as Secretary of State, the California Republican pointed out on CNN's
"State of the Union" program Sunday, and last week, Clinton herself called on the State Department to release 55,000 pages of emails she turned over.
So far, the State Department has turned over about 900 of the pages to the committee, and Issa said Sunday if evidence shows she didn't turn over all her emails to that committee "it will be a crime if she knowingly withheld pursuant to the subpoena."
And even though Clinton has cooperated on the emails, Issa commented that her "voluntary cooperation does not guarantee that it's not a crime to deliver all" of the documents.
Issa also argued that the requirement to preserve emails means an expectation for officials to keep them in the hands of the government, not as their own property, and Clinton's statement about meeting preservation requirements "would be like somebody who paid their taxes five years later" and saying they kept the money on hand to pay their taxes eventually.
"If you use a non-government e-mail, you forward it to your official account or you print it out and that preserves them," Issa said. "She left office with her documents."
Issa pointed out that there were a total of three subpoenas issued while he chaired the House Oversight Committee, and there were documents that were "never produced."
And one of the reasons for the Benghazi select committee, said Issa, is that "we got double talk and false statements for years from this administration and the existence of these e-mails was hidden throughout the rest of her tenure and beyond."
Earlier in the program,
former ambassador Scott Gration complained that he lost his ambassadorship over a "double standard," because he'd advocated for the use of commerical email accounts, when Clinton had been using them all along.
Issa agreed that there was a double standard, but even more worrisome, "countless Freedom of Information act requests would have gotten those [Clinton's] documents had they been in the public domain. We may never get many of them, because we don't know what we don't know when it's on a server where the click of a button can delete records forever."
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