WASHINGTON: Hillary Clinton, facing criticism over her exclusive use of a private email account while US secretary of state, has called for her emails to be made public after Republicans subpoenaed the documents.
“I want the public to see my email. I asked State to release them. They (the State Department) said they will review them for release as soon as possible,” Clinton said in a tweet late Wednesday night.
Clinton, a leading Democrat contender likely to enter the 2016 presidential race, faced criticism this week when it emerged that she exclusively used a private email account for her work while serving as the US top diplomat from 2009 to 2013.
The revelations opened a potential legal quagmire, with accusations that she violated federal record-keeping rules.
But it also raised questions about what might have motivated Clinton to not use a federal government email account making her correspondence part of the public record, and prompted critics to argue the presumptive Democratic White House frontrunner was seeking to evade scrutiny.
At the State Department, deputy spokesperson Marie Harf said the department would review such a release “using a normal process that guides such releases.”
She added: “We will undertake this review as quickly as possible; given the sheer volume of the document set, this review will take some time to complete.”
Earlier Wednesday, Trey Gowdy, the Republican chairman a special House committee set up to investigate the deadly terror attacks on the US mission in Benghazi said he would take “legal recourse” to obtain all emails the presumed Democratic frontrunner wrote while secretary of state.
Later in the day, the committee issued subpoenas “for all communications of former secretary of state Hillary Clinton related to Libya,” committee spokesman Jamal Ware said in a statement.
The committee also sent “preservation letters” to Internet firms demanding they protect all relevant documents.
“We’re going to get them,” committee chairman Gowdy told reporters of the emails.
“We have to go to the source, which would be secretary Clinton herself.”
Clinton had no federal government email address during her four years at State, and aides did not seek to preserve her emails on department servers at the time, according to The New York Times, which first reported the story.
The emerging scandal puts Clinton in an awkward bind, with Republicans rushing to denounce the actions and Democrats hesitant about how to defend the woman seen as their party’s leading White House hope.
Many Democratic lawmakers declined to comment about what some critics have already begun to call “emailgate.”
“I wouldn’t know” how the scandal might impact Clinton should she mount a presidential run, veteran House Democrat John Lewis demurred.
Until now Clinton had remained publicly silent on the issue. But several of her Republican potential 2016 rivals have pounced, including Jeb Bush who tweeted that “unclassified Hillary Clinton emails should be released.” (AFP)
