Jason Chaffetz asks US Attorney to open criminal probe of Hillary emails

Jason Chaffetz asks US Attorney to open criminal probe of Hillary emails

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) has asked the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia (USADC) to review the email case against Hillary Clinton because evidence “may amount to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence.”

The FBI released its notes from its investigation into the private server Hillary used when she served as secretary of state. Agents discovered that some of her aides destroyed a few of her BlackBerry devices with a hammer while no one can find an Archive Laptop with 902 emails. Someone, the FBI blacked out the name, told agents that he/she “deleted the Clinton archive mailbox from the PRN server and used BleachBit to delete the exported.”

Chaffetz also asked Platte River Networks (PRN), Hillary’s IT management company, “for information related to potential evidence destruction.”

Chaffetz wrote to the USADC:

The FBI’s investigative files reveal evidence that an engineer at Platte River Networks, the company responsible for maintaining the Secretary’s third personal email server, deleted preservation orders and a congressional subpoena. Additional information-a conference call with Secretary Clinton’s attorney days before deletions; a work ticket created on or about the date of deletion; the use of Bleachbit, a software program designed to prevent recovery of evidence; the manual deletion of Datto backups; and the engineer’s refusal to discuss conference calls-raises questions about Secretary Clinton’s involvement.

Therefore, Chaffetz believes the USADC “should investigate and determine whether Secretary Clinton or her employees and contractors violated statutes that prohibit destruction of records, obstruction of congressional inquiries, and concealment or cover up of evidence material to a congressional investigation.” He also wants the office to find out why Hillary deleted these files.

In the letter to PRN, Chaffetz told CEO Treve Suazo that the Committee’s examination found that some employees at the company may have had a hand in deletion of evidence:

In brief, the summaries of the FBI’s interviews with a PRN engineer show that within days of a conference call with Secretary Clinton’s lawyers, the engineer deleted archives of Secretary Clinton’s emails, despite knowing those records were covered by preservation orders and a subpoena from Congress. The same interview summaries show that days after the conference call, a work ticket was created at PRN relating to the administration of Secretary Clinton’s email server. The contents of the ticket were not provided. Forensic analysis of Secretary Clinton’s private email servers by the FBI revealed that Secretary Clinton had not turned over all her work-related emails, despite her claims to the contrary, meaning some responsive records may have been included in the archives that PRN deleted. Due to the PRN engineer’s use of a prohram called Bleachbit, however, the FBI was apparently unable to retrieve those archives. Bleachbit is designed to “shred the files to prevent recovery.”

A PRN spokesperson said:

But a spokesman for the company wrote, “Platte River Networks did not, at any time, treat the server belonging to the Clinton’s differently than we did any other client. We maintain all security precautions were in place, and continued to be so, throughout our service to said client.”

Chaffetz told radio host Hugh Hewitt the committee may subpoena Sid Blumenthal, a longtime friend to the Clintons, since he sent many memos to Hillary with classified information:

“I mean, we still have a lot of moving parts here, and we’re trying to recover this. This, Hugh, this is potentially one of the largest breaches of security in the history of the State Department. So we’re not letting go on this. We’re going to get to the truth. We’ve got to make sure that this classified information isn’t able to walk out the door,” Chaffetz added. “Remember, there are two email systems at the State Department. You don’t just simply get a classified email and then whoops, I forwarded to the wrong person. You have to go to great lengths to take it off that system, or summarize what you saw, and put it on the non-classified system. So how Sidney Blumenthal and others are integrated into this really still, we need to get to the truth.
Pressed on whether he would use his subpoena power to gather people like Blumenthal to testify before the committee, Chaffetz responded, “I am not going to be bashful in using it.”

“I’ve tried to bend over backwards to give people a fair, honest chance. But if not, we’re going to start issuing subpoenas, absolutely,” the Utah Republican said.

Chaffetz’s request comes a week after 50 House Republicans asked the Justice Department for a new probe into the Clinton Foundation over alleged “pay to play” from donors to gain access to Hillary.

Rep. John Ratcliffe (R-TX) penned the letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch due to an Associated Press report that the majority of the people who met with Hillary during her term “gave money – either personally or through companies or groups – to the Clinton Foundation.”

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