House Oversight Panel Asks Federal Prosecutor to Probe Deleted Clinton Emails

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican chairman of the House committee investigating Hillary Clinton's email practices asked a federal prosecutor Tuesday to determine whether she and others working with her played a role in the deletion of thousands of her emails by a Colorado technology firm overseeing her private computer server in 2015.

The written request by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah, and obtained by The Associated Press, is based on recent revelations from the FBI, which decided not to press for criminal charges after its own yearlong investigation.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Clinton and her longtime aide and lawyer, Cheryl Mills, told FBI investigators during questioning that they had no knowledge of the technology company's deletions. Those occurred separately from the email deletions overseen by the former secretary of state's legal team last year before she turned over 33,000 work-related messages to the State Department. The FBI's recently released summaries of its investigation did not offer any evidence contradicting their statements.

In a separate letter also obtained by the AP, Chaffetz — the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman — warned the Denver-based tech firm, Platte River Networks, that one of its engineers who deleted Clinton's electronic files last year could face federal charges of obstructing evidence for erasing the material. That's because the congressional inquiry into the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed, had issued a formal order to preserve such records.

The moves by the GOP led-House committee amount to new political complications for Clinton's presidential campaign, which was spared a legal ordeal in July when FBI Director James Comey upbraided Clinton for careless email practices but declined to seek criminal charges after the bureau's investigation.

But the sparse evidence laid out in Chaffetz' letters — highlighting a March 2015 phone discussion between the tech firm and Clinton lawyers that FBI agents were unable to detail — also shows the uphill climb the committee faces in turning up any significant new information beyond what the FBI already learned in its inquiry.

The new requests follow a similar attempt last month by Republican-led committees in the House and Senate to prod new information from the Denver firm as the presidential race between Clinton and Republican candidate Donald Trump enters its critical final months. Despite Comey's insistence that he made the right call in declining to ask for criminal charges in Clinton's handling of her private emails, Trump and GOP allies have urged the appointment of an independent prosecutor — an unlikely prospect so late in the election.

"The bottom line is these documents were destroyed and they were records under subpoena," Chaffetz told the AP in a brief interview. Chaffetz said "Secretary Clinton has fought this every step of the way. The election should not slow down this probe."

Clinton's campaign was not immediately available to respond to requests for comment. The Denver-based firm and its lawyer were similarly not immediately available for their reactions.

Chaffetz's letter to the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Channing Phillips, comes nearly two months after the House committee similarly asked the same prosecutor to determine whether Clinton committed perjury and made false statements in testimony to congressional committees. The new referral, which aims to again involve the FBI, asked the Justice Department to "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."