WASHINGTON -- The chairman of a House committee investigating 2012 attacks on U.S. diplomatic sites in Benghazi, Libya, said Tuesday that he wants to interview former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton by May 1.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said a recorded interview would help the committee better understand decisions Clinton made "relevant to the creation, maintenance, retention, and ultimately deletion of public records" -- namely, her emails.
Gowdy said Friday that Clinton had wiped her private email server "clean" and permanently deleted all emails from it.
Clinton, a likely Democratic presidential candidate, used a private email account and server during her tenure at the State Department from 2009-13. She has refused Gowdy's request to turn over her server to a third party for an independent review.
Her lawyer, David Kendall, said Friday that Clinton has turned over to the State Department all work-related emails. Kendall also said it would be pointless for Clinton to turn over her server, since "no emails ... reside on the server or on any backup systems associated with the server."
Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said Tuesday that Clinton told Gowdy's committee months ago that she was ready to appear at a public hearing.
"It is by their choice that hasn't happened," Merrill said. "To be clear, she remains ready to appear at a hearing open to the American public."
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the top Democrat on the Benghazi panel, also said Clinton agreed to testify months ago, in public and under oath, "so the Select Committee's claim that it has no choice but to subject her to a private staff interview is inaccurate."
Rather than drag out what he called a "political charade," Cummings said, the committee should schedule a public hearing with Clinton, make her email public "and refocus its efforts on the attacks in Benghazi." Four Americans were killed in the September 2012 attacks, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.
But Gowdy continued Tuesday to push for access to the server, saying it is technically possible in many instances to recover electronic information that has been deleted or overwritten.
"It is precisely for this reason a neutral and objective party must have access to the server and related equipment to identify information potentially responsive to relevant laws and investigative requests," he wrote in a letter to Kendall.
Gowdy also reminded Kendall that the server and any associated information, data, backups and equipment "must be preserved wherever they reside and that any further deletion or destruction of data or information must cease."
Clinton has said she exchanged about 60,000 emails while secretary of state, about half of which were work-related and have been turned over to the State Department. She said none contained classified information.
On Tuesday, the State Department said it can find only four emails sent between Clinton and her staff members concerning drone strikes and certain U.S. surveillance programs, and those notes have little to do with either subject.
She asks for a phone call in one, a phone number in another. She seeks advice on how best to condemn information leaks and accidentally replies to one work email with questions apparently about decorations.
The messages also reveal Clinton used an iPad to email while secretary of state in addition to her BlackBerry, despite her explanation she set up the private email account and server while she was the nation's top diplomat so that she could carry a single device.
The four emails were obtained by The Associated Press under a 2013 Freedom of Information Act request. It is the first time the State Department has provided Clinton-related documents in response to several outstanding requests, the first of which AP filed in 2010.
The response also came about three weeks after AP filed a federal lawsuit against the State Department, seeking to force the release of materials during Clinton's tenure.
The 2013 request sought correspondence between Clinton and her advisers over a four-year period that contained keywords such as "drone," "metadata" and "prism." The latter was among several code words for U.S. surveillance programs revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Although Clinton left office four months before the Snowden leaks were first published in June 2013, the AP's request sought messages about those programs before they were publicly disclosed.
Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists, said the low number of emails provided to AP could be because the State Department uses different words to describe its operations -- such as "UAV," or unmanned aerial vehicle, instead of "drone."
It's also possible that Clinton and her advisers' emails are not in the department's archives, he said.
Information for this article was contributed by Ken Thomas of The Associated Press.
A Section on 04/01/2015