Subpoena Hillary's Email Server

Thanks to Tuesday’s State Department document dump, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s email server is back in the news. The roughly 3,000 emails that State plopped on the media were among those that Clinton supposedly surrendered before she wiped that server as clean as a chalkboard at the start of class.

But what if that server still brims with Clinton’s emails and other documents?

I strongly suspect that Clinton has erased nothing. Her server is pristine. Hillary and company only say that it has been deleted.

“I have confirmed with the secretary’s IT support that no emails . . . for the time period January 21, 2009 through February 1, 2013 reside on the server or on any back-up systems associated with the server,” Clinton’s attorney, David Kendall, wrote the House Select Committee on Benghazi. “Thus, there are no hdr22@clintonemail.com e-mails from Secretary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State on the server for any review, even if such review were appropriate or legally authorized.”

By asserting that contents of the server have been obliterated, Clinton enjoys the political advantage of pretending to delete it: Republicans largely have stopped asking for the device.

Hillary’s server is empty, GOPers think. So, why bother with it?

Instead, Republicans probing Clinton’s role in the Benghazi massacre trust bureaucrats at State to share emails from among those that Clinton hand-picked in the first place. At best, Benghazi Committee chairman Rep. Trey Gowdy, R–S.C., and others are seeing a subset of a subset of Clinton’s emails.

Meanwhile, my hunch is that Clinton has touched nothing. This leaves her totally immune to federal charges of destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice because she craftily has done no such thing.

“It’s entirely possible that Hillary is lying when she claims to have wiped her server,” former federal prosecutor Sidney Powell tells me. “Her bald claims to have done so seem to have deflected attention from the server and bought her a pass — at a minimum stalling and diverting the substantive investigation.”

The author of "Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice" adds, “If Hillary actually did not erase her own server, and is lying about having done so, she hasn’t actually destroyed evidence. And if her lies were not under oath, she’s not subject to a perjury prosecution. It’s the Clinton version of ‘bait and switch.’”

“There is no downside to issuing a subpoena for the server,” says former assistant U.S. attorney and author Andrew McCarthy. “There is no procedural reason to refrain.‘Bloodhounds’ is not the word I’d use to describe GOP investigators.”

Indeed, four months since Servergate broke, the House has yet to subpoena the damn thing. “If we need to do that, we may have to,” House Speaker John Boehner uttered flaccidly last April on Bloomberg TV.

Gowdy believes that the House’s power to subpoena Clinton’s server is “an open constitutional question.”

It’s past time to ask that question. If the server is intact, let’s learn what’s on it. If Clinton smashed it into 100 pieces, the American people should see the debris.

“If Congress subpoenas the server, the result will be a long court battle,” predicts Power Line columnist Paul Mirengoff, an attorney. “But that’s OK. Let Clinton campaign for the presidency while fighting to keep tens of thousands of emails out of the public domain.”

So, then, are Republicans simply scared of Hillary Clinton? Gowdy’s and Boehner’s entreaties to Clinton (e.g., inviting her to testify at her leisure rather than ordering her, a private citizen, to show up with her server and sing — now!) resemble rose petals tossed in her path, not the boxing gloves that Democrats smash into Republicans.

If Democrats controlled Congress, and Condoleezza Rice hid a private server, a federal SWAT team months ago would have splintered Rice’s front door with a battering ram and grabbed the machine in the middle of the night — a la Elian Gonzalez.

Deroy Murdock is a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. Read more reports from Deroy Murdock — Click Here Now.