In the middle of September, Chairman of the House Oversight Committee, Jason Chaffetz, served the FBI with subpoena papers. This is newsworthy in itself, but is made more so by the fact that Chaffetz abruptly stopped a hearing on Capitol Hill in order to serve the subpoena related to Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. “You are hereby served,” he said to Jason Herring, the FBI’s acting assistant director for congressional affairs.
The Email Scandal
Hillary Clinton’s email problems have been haunting her for more than a year now, and anybody watching the 2016 Presidential Election knows it. Instead of using the State Department email system during her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton used only a private email system with the servers kept in her New York home. Since she didn’t use the government’s system, her emails were not available for the House Select Committee on Benghazi. Her lawyers selected 30,000 work-related emails and provided them to the State Department, then deleted the remainder.
Clinton asserts that the rest of the emails were personal and of no relevance to her work as secretary of state, and that she only used the private server for a matter of convenience. Classified information ended up on her private server, but there has not been enough information to charge her with a crime. The FBI has declared that the amount of classified information that she mishandled is miniscule compared to the amount she dealt with on a regular basis.
Chaffetz’s Goal
Chaffetz has subpoenaed the FBI for the full case file in the Clinton email investigation. As he stated when he served the papers, “It’s ‘trust, but verify’ is how it works. You don’t get to decide what I see. I get to see it all.” He believes that the FBI is trying to filter what the committee probe gets to see by deeming only certain things relevant, but “That’s the way a banana republic acts, not the way the United States of America acts. I don’t expect to have to issue a subpoena to see unclassified information.”
