G.O.P. Seeks Inquiry on Whether Hillary Clinton Obstructed Justice Over Emails

 

G.O.P. Seeks Inquiry on Whether Hillary Clinton Obstructed Justice Over Emails

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTSEPT. 6, 2016

Representative Jason Chaffetz in July. He has said that Hillary Clinton’s emails should not have been deleted because there were orders from two congressional committees to preserve messages on her account. Credit Al Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — House Republicans asked the Justice Department on Tuesday to investigate whether Hillary Clinton, her lawyers and the company that housed her email account obstructed justice when emails were deleted from her personal server.

It was the second time in two months that Republicans urged the authorities to open an inquiry related to Mrs. Clinton.

Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, the chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said that the emails should not have been deleted because there were orders in place at the time from two congressional committees to preserve messages on the account.

“The department should investigate and determine whether Secretary Clinton or her employees and contractors violated statutes that prohibit destruction of records, obstruction of congressional inquiries, and concealment or cover-up of evidence material to a congressional investigation,” Mr. Chaffetz said in a letter to the United States attorney’s office for the District of Columbia.

Mr. Chaffetz also sent a letter to the Denver-based company that housed the account, Platte River Networks, with a request for documents and information related to the account and the deletions.
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What We Know About Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server

A private email server used by Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state has been the focus of a half-dozen inquiries and legal proceedings.
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Since the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, announced on July 5 that the bureau would recommend that Mrs. Clinton not be charged in connection with her use of the account, Republicans have pushed the Justice Department to continue investigating her. Just five days after Mr. Comey’s announcement, they asked the department to open an inquiry into whether Mrs. Clinton had lied in October when she testified before the committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Mrs. Clinton dismissed Mr. Chaffetz’s request when asked about it by reporters on her campaign plane in Tampa, Fla. “The F.B.I. resolved all of this,” she said. “Their report answered all the questions the findings included debunking the latest conspiracy theories.”

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, the top Democrat on the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the request for another investigation was “just the latest misguided attempt to use taxpayer funds to help the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, and to essentially redo what the F.B.I. has already investigated because Republicans disagree with the outcome for political reasons.”

The Republicans’ request has been met with silence from the Justice Department and the F.B.I., and prosecutors have shown no indication that they are willing to open another investigation. Legal experts have said that making a perjury case against Mrs. Clinton would be difficult.

The F.B.I. released 58 pages of investigative documents on Friday related to its inquiry into Mrs. Clinton’s email practices and whether she and her aides mishandled classified information. The documents included a summary of an interview agents conducted with her and a memorandum about the case.
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According to the documents, a top aide to Mrs. Clinton told Platte River Networks in December 2014 to delete an archive of emails from her account. But Platte River apparently never followed those instructions.

Roughly three weeks after the existence of the account was revealed in March 2015, a Platte River employee deleted emails using a program called BleachBit. By that time, both Mr. Chaffetz’s committee and the special committee investigating the Benghazi attacks had called for the emails to be preserved, according to Mr. Chaffetz.

“This timeline of events raises questions as to whether the P.R.N. engineer violated federal statutes that prohibit destruction of evidence and obstruction of a congressional investigation, among others, when the engineer erased Secretary Clinton’s email contrary to congressional preservation orders and a subpoena,” Mr. Chaffetz said in the letter to Platte River.

Mr. Chaffetz said that a series of events in the days leading up to the deletions, including a conference call with Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers and the creation of a work ticket, “raises questions about whether Secretary Clinton, acting through her attorneys, instructed P.R.N. to destroy records relevant to the then-ongoing congressional investigations.”

Democrats said that Mr. Chaffetz’s facts were wrong. The F.B.I.’s memo shows that the Platte River employee who deleted the documents “did so on his own volition and before the conference call with Clinton’s attorneys,” Jennifer Werner, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cummings, said in an email.

The F.B.I. said it was later able to find some of the emails, but it did not say how many had been deleted or whether they were included in the 60,000 emails that Mrs. Clinton said she had sent and received as secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Amy Chozick contributed reporting from Tampa, Fla.