Rep. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) says Hillary Clinton should testify before the special select committee examining the tragedy in Benghazi. Duckworth added she would hold former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton “accountable” for erasing emails from her personal server.

Duckworth’s strong stand may be a matter of political expediency. She’s running for U.S. Senate, for a seat Democrats would probably need to take if they hope to reclaim the majority in the elections in 2016. She is challenging first-term Senator Mark Kirk (R-IL), a former military intelligence officer. Duckworth herself is a veteran of the Iraq War.

Duckworth’s statement is one of the first signs Democrat politicians may have to separate themselves from Hillary Clinton and the controversy over her email while she was Secretary of State.

That such a high-profile Democrat recruit, facing election in 2016, would distance herself from Clinton indicates growing worry within the party about the impact of the scandal on their election prospects.

Duckworth went even further than demanding that Clinton testify and said that Clinton “had to have been emailing classified documents” on her private email server while she led the State Department.

Clinton has ardently claimed that she never emailed classified materials. Clinton’s private email server was outside the government’s secure system, raising the real prospect that such materials could have been intercepted by foreign governments.