GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy, top Benghazi investigator
During a House hearing on government transparency Tuesday, Democrats wondered: where were the emails from President Bush's former Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell? Josh Gerstein
reports:
"Do we have any emails from Sec. Powell?" Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) asked at the House Oversight Committee hearing with top Freedom of Information Act officers from five government agencies, including the state department.
"We did ask him if he had any official records," Assistant Secretary for Administration Joyce Barr said. "He did not have any records to return to us." Barr added that some official emails for Rice had been located but she said she rarely used email at all.
Ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings of Maryland called "startling" the lack of records from the two Bush-era secretaries. "I hope that we will look at that era just like we have been looking at the present era," Cummings said.
Don't count on it, cuz GOP Rep. Trey Gowdy doesn't have room on his dance card for anyone but Hillary—who actually delivered about 30,000 emails to the state at the agency's request. Powell and Rice provided zip.
Gowdy focused in on Clinton, noting that State could not say that Clinton had properly segregated her work-related emails from her personal ones.
"You can't look at what you don't have," Gowdy noted.
"We are processing what she provided to us. She has told us that she erred on the side of inclusion," Barr replied.
"What assurance can you give the public the State Department has everything that could be considered a public record from her tenure as secretary of state?"
"She has assured us that she gave us everything. ... Like we do with other federal employees, we have to depend on them to provide the information to us," Barr said. "We've accepted her assurance that she's given us everything that she had."
Key words: "Like we do with other federal employees ..." The only thing that's exceptional here is Gowdy's focus on Clinton, her emails and Benghazi, not the fact that she had a personal email account or that she had some discretion over which of those emails to make public. Even the
New York Times eventually
made that clear.
