The chairman of the House Committee on Benghazi is formally requesting Hillary Clinton turn over her private email server to a third party for a “neutral” investigation of its contents.

Rep. Trey Gowdy wrote to Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, Thursday asking the former secretary of state to make the server available to the State Department’s inspector general “or another neutral, detached, and independent arbiter.”


House Republicans have sought access to the server since the news earlier this month that Clinton used a private email for official purposes during her time at State and her documents were not stored within the State Department, but instead on a private server off-site.

Clinton regained control over those emails but turned over thousands of pages of documents to the State Department for release — except personal emails that Clinton said during a press conference focus on more mundane matters like yoga, her daughter’s wedding and family vacations.

But the exclusion of thousands of emails from the State Department’s review prompted questions from Republicans that Clinton may have withheld official correspondence from her time at State. Gowdy was one of the first Republicans to call for Clinton to make the server available for review — a request Speaker John Boehner joined earlier this week.

“The committee must have objective assurances it, and by extension the House of Representatives as a whole, has received all relevant information requested and necessary for a thorough investigation into what happened before, during and after the attacks in Benghazi, Libya,” Gowdy wrote in the letter.

Across the rotunda, Sen. Chuck Grassley also pressured the State Department on Friday over his ongoing request for information about Clinton and her staffers’ use of private emails. The Iowa Republican said in a letter to Secretary John Kerry that he is concerned that the private emails stop Freedom of Information Act request from being fulfilled and could give private companies access to official government documents.

“A number of conflict of interest concerns arise when a government employee is simultaneously being paid by a private company….these concerns are heightened when high level employees … may have used non-government email accounts to engage in both government and private business,” Grassley wrote.

The State Department, Clinton and 10 of her staffers are already under a subpoena request for documents the former secretary of state turned over to the agency, but that request does not force her to turn over the server stored in her New York home. Clinton has until March 27 to respond to the subpoena request from the Benghazi Committee for documents relating to Libya.

The committee already has 15,000 documents containing Clinton’s emails, many of which have never been shared with congressional investigators before. But the panel is seeking all correspondence from her time as secretary of state that deal with Libya. Gowdy also said in the letter it took months of email exchanges and briefings with the State Department for officials there to share with the committee that Clinton only used a personal email address. And the panel’s investigators were never told she retained control of the emails on a personal server, he said.

This formal request from Gowdy amps up his panel’s participation in what has become a heated political battle. Clinton and other congressional Democrats have dismissed the focus on emails as an attempt to undermine Clinton’s likely 2016 presidential campaign. Gowdy has stated repeatedly he is only interested in investigating the Benghazi attacks but this letter gives him significant responsibility for overseeing the transfer of Clinton’s full email archives to Congress.

Democrats on the committee quickly criticized Gowdy’s letter.

“The secretary has already provided her work-related emails to the State Department and those relevant to Benghazi have been turned over to the committee,” said Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). “None of them support the various conspiracy theories that have been advanced about the tragic death of four Americans on that terrible day. The secretary has urged the committee to make these public, and the chairman has refused.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the Benghazi Committee, said the request “seem[s] designed to spark a fight with a potential presidential candidate rather than following the standard practice in congressional investigations.”

The letter also sheds greater details on a dispute between Gowdy and Clinton over the number of email addresses she had while at State. Gowdy said earlier this month Clinton could have multiple address — an assertion Kendall denied, saying she only used one personal email at a time but employed two during her whole tenure as secretary.

Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said Clinton has already turned over “all of her work emails” to the State Department.

“We’ve turned over all of her work emails, and taken the extraordinary step of asking the State Department to release all of them,” Merrill said. “When they are released, which we hope to be soon, it will offer an unprecedented opportunity for the American people to see for themselves that they are all there and then some.”

Gowdy wrote in the letter that his committee received emails from Clinton’s [email protected] address and another address known as “H.”

“The “H address raised the possibility that Secretary Clinton used more than one email address, including the possibility that the “H address was associated with a ‘.gov’ address,” Gowdy wrote.

Gowdy asked for a response from Kendall by April 3.

A spokesman for the Office of Inspector General said they were not consulted in advance about Gowdy’s proposal and were not copied on the congressman’s letter. The State Department’s inspector general is Steve Linick.