'Huge
gaps' in Clinton email record, Benghazi probe chief says
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[March 09, 2015]
By Lisa Lambert and Timothy Gardner
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Huge gaps exist in
the emails former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has provided
to a congressional committee investigating the 2012 attack on a U.S.
consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the panel's chairman said on Sunday.
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Republican Representative Trey Gowdy said his committee lacked
documentation from Clinton's trip to Libya after the attack despite
a popular photo image of her using a handheld device during a flight
to that country.
"We have no emails from that day. In fact we have no emails from
that trip," said Gowdy, who heads the committee in the U.S. House of
Representatives. "There are huge gaps."
Widely considered the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic
presidential nomination, Clinton used a private email account for
all official business as President Barack Obama's secretary of state
from 2009 to 2013.
Republicans have scrutinized Clinton's actions over the Benghazi
attack in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other people were
killed. The private email disclosure, published in The New York
Times last week, raised Republican concerns about Clinton's
commitment to transparency.
![](http://archives.lincolndailynews.com/2015/Mar/09/images/ads/current/stacy_sda_121014.png) She has since asked the State Department to release her emails but a
State Department official said the review would take some time.
Clinton gave the committee eight emails last August and 300 in
February related to the attack, Gowdy said on CBS's Face the Nation.
Last week, the committee subpoenaed the State Department for other
emails. Gowdy said that in fairness the committee would not release
the emails' content selectively.
The State Department has requested email records from all former
secretaries of state, and Clinton has given it 50,000 pages of
records to review.
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Speaking separately on Sunday, former Secretary of State Colin
Powell, responding to reports he too had a private email account
rather than a government one, said he did not have emails to give
the department.
"I retained none of those emails and we are working with the State
Department to see if there's anything else they want to discuss with
me about those emails," he said on ABC's This Week.
Powell said that when he started as secretary of state under
Republican President George W. Bush, the State Department computer
systems were antiquated and he strove to update them. In November,
its unclassified email system was hacked and had to be shut down
temporarily.
Obama said on Saturday he only recently learned of Clinton's private
email account.
(Additional reporting by Richard Cowan; Editing by Howard Goller)
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