Chaffetz demands independent review of Clinton obstruction evidence

By Kathryn Watson, DCNF

House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz asked the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia (USADC) Tuesday to review evidence from the FBI’s recent interviews to decide whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or her confidantes broke the law.

The Utah Republican wrote to U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips saying his committee discovered a “sequence of events that may amount to obstruction of justice and destruction of evidence by Secretary Clinton and her employees and contractors, including her attorneys, employees of Platte River Networks, and employees of Clinton Executive Services Corporation.”

The FBI made public late Friday before the Labor Day weekend a summary of its investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email account and servers. The committee had received a limited selection of files from the investigation two weeks earlier.

“In light of this information, the department (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,” Chaffetz wrote.

Chaffetz said an engineer at Platte River Networks (PRN) — the Denver-based IT company Clinton used to host one of her private email servers — deleted Clinton’s email archives in March 2015, despite knowing those records were under preservation orders and a congressional subpoena.

The FBI’s discovery of a conference call with Clinton’s lawyers days before the deletions, a work ticket created possibly the same day as that deletion, use of a software program designed to prevent evidence recovery and the manual deletion of backups “raise questions about Secretary Clinton’s involvement,” Chaffetz said.

Chaffetz also sent a letter Tuesday to Platte River Networks, demanding information about destruction of evidence. The IT company has until Sept. 13 to hand over names, emails, work tickets and non-disclosure agreements related to Clinton’s server.

“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,” Chaffetz wrote to PRN Chief Executive Officer Treve Suazo.

PRN did not have a proper security clearance to handle classified information, as The Daily Caller News Foundation first reported.

The FBI summary released Friday revealed the FBI could not recover Clinton’s 13 mobile devices from her lawyers, and that a Department of State staffer sometimes destroyed her old Blackberry phones with a hammer.

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