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Grothman Questions FBI Director on Clinton Emails 

(Washington, D.C.) – Congressman Glenn Grothman (R-Glenbeulah) today questioned Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director James Comey at an Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing about the FBI’s recommendation not to prosecute former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for maintaining a private server.

Click here to watch Congressman Grothman’s full line of questioning of Director Comey.

Excerpts of Congressman Grothman’s questions below:

On punishments for intelligence agency employees if they were to use a private server for emails:

As I understand it, your testimony today is that you have not brought criminal charges against Hillary Clinton in part because you feel you can’t prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, and in part because she didn’t understand the law in regards to emails and servers and that sort of thing. When she erased these emails – I digress for a second, you, however, did say that if someone did this under you, there would be consequences. If somebody did exactly what Mrs. Clinton did, but was one of your lieutenants, or you think one of the lieutenants under the CIA, DIA or some other agency that deals with top-secret documents, what would you do to those underlings?

On the process of erasing emails:

The erasures here, however, were not just Mrs. Clinton pressing delete were they? There was a much greater effort made to make sure that these emails would never be recovered. Do you want to comment on what was done to erase the emails?

So in other words, the effort was not just Mrs. Clinton or someone going delete, delete, delete. They went above and beyond that so you’re top technical experts could not get back these emails, correct?

On if Clinton’s erased emails could have contained information about the Clinton Foundation and Benghazi:

The information that I have is that these erasures were done in December of 2014, after the Benghazi scandal broke, after there were questions about the Clinton Foundation. Did you ever come across why she allowed these out there even for years after she stopped being Secretary of State, but all of a sudden all of these scandals started to bubble up and she felt – or her lawyers felt – that she had to erase them?

Do you think Mrs. Clinton knew that the technical people were erasing these emails so that even your top technical experts couldn’t recover them?

 You don’t think the lawyers told her that’s what they were doing – erasing all these emails that everyone on this committee wanted to look at?

Now, as I understand it, the goal was just to erase personal emails, but you’ve recovered emails that wouldn’t be considered personal emails at all. But based upon the emails that you recovered, presumably her lawyer or someone was going well beyond personal emails, is it possible that we’ll never be able to recover emails that dealt with the Clinton Foundation, or dealt with the Benghazi scandal? Is it possible because of what her lawyers did that they were erasing things that were incriminating – maybe items that you yourself were not personally investigating but have now been destroyed forever?

I’m sorry, but when you go to these lengths to make sure that you can never recover the emails that were erased, wouldn’t you think the intent is to make sure that no one ever looks at them again? Otherwise, why would you go to that length?

Background:

On Tuesday, July 5, 2016, Director Comey announced that the FBI would not recommend criminal charges for Secretary Clinton despite the fact she used her private server to send classified emails relating to her work as Secretary of State.

Director Comey’s statement on Tuesday exposed lies told by Secretary Clinton to the American public about her emails, including the fact that she deleted work-related emails alongside personal ones, and that she sent classified emails from her private server. Additionally, it was revealed that she did not turn over all work-related emails to the State Department in 2014.

The statement by the FBI also noted that Secretary Clinton’s handling of her emails was careless because she used her unprotected, personal email domain regularly outside of the United States, including sending work-related emails in areas with sophisticated hacking technologies.

U.S. Rep. Glenn Grothman is serving his first term representing Wisconsin’s 6^th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.

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