Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC)
House Republicans, like the Beltway media, are whipping themselves into a frenzy over Hillary Clinton's emails. But unlike the media, House Republicans can
issue subpoenas, and not one, not two, but three committees are talking about doing so:
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) says his House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee is opening an investigation into whether Clinton violated government record-keeping and security regulations by using a private email server to handle official State Department communications. Chaffetz has threatened to subpoena Clinton to get what he wants.
California Rep. Ed Royce’s House Foreign Affairs Committee has signaled it might jump in as well, emailing at least one reporter seeking information about internal State Department concerns regarding Clinton’s emails.
And Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-S.C.) Benghazi select committee, which has drawn the most headlines so far, has issued a subpoena for all of Clinton’s State Department communications, with a deadline in the coming weeks. Gowdy’s panel is also actively exploring options with congressional attorneys about whether they can take control of Clinton’s email server, which is stored in her Westchester County, N.Y., home.
Republican leadership's big concern over this is traffic management: making sure that each committee has its own distinct topic to investigate and that they're not all overlapping. So, for instance, Gowdy has dibs on all the Libya-related emails and Chaffetz has to go trawling for other juicy bits. It's not clear yet whether Republicans will be able to seize Clinton's email server, but by gum they're going to do their best to make it a giant political issue.
And making a giant political issue over something a Clinton did has always gone so well for them. Seriously, can Republicans and the media stop trying to make us relive the 1990s?