There are still significant gaps in the emails former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has turned over to the committee investigating the Benghazi terror attacks, Rep. Trey Gowdy said Sunday, including from the day a now-iconic photo of her was taken while she was flying to Libya.
"There are gaps of months and months and months," Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican and head of the House select committee on Benghazi, told CBS'
"Face the Nation" host Bob Schieffer.
"If you think to that iconic picture of her on a C-17 flying to Libya, sunglasses on, she has her handheld device in her hand, [but] we have no emails from that day. In fact, we have no emails from that trip."
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Clinton has used that photograph as the cover shot on
official Twitter account, and Gowdy said it hard to believe there are no emails available from that trip.
"It strains credibility to believe that if you’re on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy that there’s not a single document has been turned over to Congress," said Gowdy.
Further, he told Schieffer, it's not up to Clinton to decide what is a public record and what is not, and he's lost confidence in the State Department to make the determination on the matter.
"They're the ones who allowed this arrangement, and did nothing about this arrangement until they got the request from our committee," Gowdy said, noting that a "neutral, detached auditor" is needed to determine what should be considered a public record.
And while Gowdy said his committee is not entitled to everything on the email records, and he doesn't want everything, "I just want everything related to Libya and Benghazi."
Clinton last week, through her Twitter account, called upon the State Department to make the emails public, and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings, the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi committee, has recommended Gowdy release some 300 emails that Clinton has already turned over,
reports Mediaite.
However, Gowdy told Schieffer that he would not selectively release the emails.
"We don't have all of them," he said. "There's a reason that serious investigations don't leak and make selective releases. … It's frankly not fair to the secretary, not fair to your viewers, my fellow citizens, to selectively release information."
But if Clinton wants to release all of her emails, "with the emphasis being on the word 'all,' she's welcome to do that," Gowdy said. "I can't stop her from doing that. [But] serious investigations don't make selective releases.
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