House Panels Lay Out Case for Clinton Perjury Accusations
Two House committees sent a letter to the Department of Justice Monday laying out their case for why they believe Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton committed perjury during a hearing in Congress last year.
The letter to U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Channing Phillips from the Oversight and Government Reform and Judiciary committees provides four specific examples of times they believe Clinton lied under oath about her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of State. The letter said Clinton made several false statements during her testimony to the House Select Committee on Benghazi on October 22, 2015.
Monday's letter follows one the committees sent to Phillips in July requesting the DOJ look into whether Clinton perjured herself. Assistant Attorney General Peter J. Kadzik responded in an August 2 letter saying that the department was reviewing the information and would "take appropriate action as necessary."
[Republicans Seek Perjury Probe of Clinton]
Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz and Judiciary Chairman Robert W. Goodlatte said in their August 15 letter that the examples they were providing are to assist in that investigation.
"The evidence collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) during its investigation of Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email system during her time as secretary of State appears to directly contradict several aspects of her sworn testimony," the chairmen wrote.
The first example they cite is Clinton saying in response to a question about emails she handled on her private server that "there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received."
When FBI Director James Comey testified before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in July he said that Clinton's statement was not true.
"A very small number of the emails containing classified information bore the markings indicating the presence of classified information," he said.
The chairmen offered as a second example of perjury Clinton's testimony that her attorneys reviewed every single email on her private server to identify work-related messages that should be returned to the State Department.
Comey testified that Clinton's attorneys did not read all the emails but instead relied on header information and used search terms to identify the ones that were related to work.
[Clinton Forgot It's Not the Crime, It's the Cover-Up]
In the third example they cite Clinton's testimony that she provided the FBI with the one private server she used while she was secretary of State. Comey contradicted that when he said that Clinton used several servers.
Finally, the chairmen cite Clinton's assertion that she gave the State Department all the work-related emails she had, which were subsequently turned over to investigators. However, Comey testified that the FBI found thousands of work-related emails that were not returned to the department.
