The House Oversight Committee is threatening the IT firm that managed Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonJoe Biden looks to expand election battleground into Trump country Biden leads Trump by 12 points among Catholic voters: poll The Hill's Campaign Report: Biden goes on offense MORE’s private email server with a subpoena if it fails to turn over related documents.

Earlier this month, the panel asked that the Denver-based Platte River Networks turn over all documents and communications relating to Clinton’s server, as well as specific information on the 2015 deletion of an email archive.

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The firm did not respond by the Tuesday deadline set by Oversight. Chairman Jason Chaffetz Jason ChaffetzThe myth of the conservative bestseller Elijah Cummings, Democratic chairman and powerful Trump critic, dies at 68 House Oversight panel demands DeVos turn over personal email records MORE (R-Utah) on Wednesday extended the deadline to Friday, “otherwise, the Committee will be required to issue a subpoena to obtain those materials.”

The Oversight Committee, which has held three hearings in the past week revolving around Clinton’s use of the server, had already issued subpoenas to force two Platte River Networks technicians to testify on Tuesday, but were stonewalled when both exercised their Fifth Amendment rights.

At issue is whether Clinton or her aides were involved in the deletion of a cache of archived emails, a charge that Oversight Democrats have termed a “conspiracy theory” but has nevertheless put the Denver firm at the epicenter of the ongoing controversy over the server.

According to the FBI’s recently released report on its investigation into Clinton’s server, a Platte River Networks technician deleted the archive from the server in March 2015 — a few weeks after The New York Times publicly revealed Clinton’s exclusive use of the server during her time in office and after the House Benghazi Committee had issued a subpoena for records relating to the attack on the Libyan outpost.

According to the FBI’s notes, longtime Clinton aide Cheryl Mills instructed technology vendor Platte River Networks to delete a set of archived emails in December of 2014. Mills told investigators Clinton had decided she no longer needed access to emails older than 60 days.

But the technician apparently forgot the request and didn’t immediately comply. According to the FBI report, between March 25 and March 31 of 2015, the technician “believed he had an 'oh shit' moment and… deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from [Platte River Networks] server.”

At that time, the Benghazi panel had already issued both a subpoena and an order that records relating to the 2012 attack be preserved.

Clinton and Mills told the FBI that they had no knowledge of the technician’s deletion of the emails. The technician, according to the report "was aware of the existence of the [Benghazi committee] preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton's email data on the [Platte River Networks] server."

In his Sept. 6 letter, Chaffetz warned the firm that the unnamed technician — identified by The New York Times as Paul Combetta — may have violated federal statutes that prohibit the destroying records and obstructing congressional inquiries.

In a timeline of events pulled from the FBI report, Chaffetz noted a conference call between Clinton’s lawyers and the engineer who maintained the server. The call took place less than a week prior to the deletion of the email archive, and the engineer refused to answer questions about the contents, according to the FBI.

“The sequence of events leading up to the destruction of Secretary Clinton’s emails… raises questions about whether Secretary Clinton, acting through her attorneys, instructed [Platte River Networks] to destroy records relevant to the then-ongoing congressional investigations,” Chaffetz wrote.

He demanded, among other things, to know whether the technician asserted the attorney-client privilege or his Fifth Amendment right in refusing to answer the FBI’s questions about the conference call.

That same day, Chaffetz issued a criminal referral to the FBI, asking a federal prosecutor to look into whether Clinton or her aides ordered the deletion.

Committee Democrats have hammered Chaffetz for his repeated use of subpoenas in association with the Committee’s investigation.

“Here is the playbook Republicans are using,” ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said in his opening statement at Tuesday’s hearing on the preservation of State Department records.

“Step One: Publicly accuse the witnesses of criminal activity and then refer them to the U.S. Attorney's office for criminal investigation. Step Two: The next day, invite these same witnesses to an emergency hearing, then rush to issue a flurry of unilateral subpoenas demanding that they testify.

“Step Three: Express false outrage when these witnesses take advice from their counsel to assert their Fifth Amendment right not to testify.”

The deleted archive is separate from the 30,000 emails Clinton's legal team deemed personal and erased prior to turning over an additional 30,000 work-related emails to the State Department in 2014.