WASHINGTON -- The chairman of a House committee investigating deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, said Wednesday that he wants an independent review of Hillary Rodham Clinton's email server, which she ins
ists should remain private.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said neither Clinton nor the committee should determine which emails are made public and which remain private.
"Let a neutral, detached, disinterested observer make that call," he said, suggesting that a retired judge or inspector general could fill the role.
House Speaker John Boehner's office did not rule out a vote in the full House to force Clinton to turn over the server.
"We are not ruling out any options at this point," said Michael Steel, a spokesman for Boehner. "Secretary Clinton must turn over the server to a neutral arbiter who can inventory the records, make a complete, thorough accounting and impartial determination" of which emails are public and which are private.
Clinton pledged at a news conference Tuesday that all of her work-related email would be made public, but she acknowledged that she deleted thousands of messages related to personal matters. Clinton said the server "will remain private."
Gowdy challenged that idea.
"Somebody's going to have to have access to her server," he said. "You don't get to grade your own papers in life. You don't get to determine what's personal and what's public."
While some emails are likely to remain personal, Gowdy said he wants to ensure that any email related to Libya or the Benghazi attacks is made available to the committee.
Gowdy, who said Tuesday that he wants Clinton to appear at least twice before the panel, said Wednesday that any discussion about her emails is likely to be private. Testimony on Benghazi will be made at a public hearing.
Gowdy also denied claims by some Democrats that he is looking to expand the jurisdiction of the Benghazi committee to focus on Clinton, who headed the State Department at the time of the attacks.
But he said, "someone does need to ask [Clinton], 'what did you do and why did you do it?'"
Also on Wednesday, The Associated Press sued the State Department for access to Clinton's emails and other records.
The news service said it sought Clinton's emails under the Freedom of Information Act in 2013, and the department didn't disclose that the former secretary of state used a private email account.
"State's failure to ensure that Secretary Clinton's governmental e-mails were retained and preserved by the agency, and its failure timely to seek out and search those e-mails in response to AP's requests, indicate at the very least that State had not engaged in the diligent, good-faith search" required by the law, according to the complaint.
Alec Gerlach, a State Department spokesman, declined to comment on the suit, citing a department policy of not discussing pending litigation.
The department said Tuesday that it would publish online the full set of 55,000 emails turned over by Clinton, after making any necessary redactions. Department spokesman Jen Psaki said the review was expected to take several months.
The AP asked in the lawsuit that the records be turned over within 20 days.
Meanwhile, the State Department's internal watchdog reported that many department employees are not preserving emails for the public record as required by the government.
The inspector general's office reported Wednesday that in 2011, when Clinton was secretary of state, department employees wrote more than 1 billion emails but marked only 61,156 for the public record. There's no way to know from the figures how many should have been designated as public records.
Emails are required to be preserved for the public record if they deal with policy, actions by officials, historically relevant information or meet a variety of other benchmarks.
Even fewer, 41,749, were marked for public records in 2013, the year Clinton left the department.
The new report does not address the use of personal email accounts, which the department discouraged employees from using in earlier guidance.
But the investigation found that employees had no central oversight of their record-keeping responsibilities with email, many did not know about the rules, and some feared the consequences of their emails being searched and exposed.
"Department officials have noted that many emails that qualify as records are not being saved as record emails," the report says. "Some employees were under the impression that record emails were only a convenience; they had not understood that some emails were required to be saved as records."
Information for this article was contributed by Matthew Daly, Calvin Woodward and staff members of The Associated Press; and by Andrew Zajac of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 03/12/2015