The House Oversight Committee is increasing the pressure on the FBI to hand over additional details related to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she was secretary of State.
In a letter on Monday, committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) asked FBI Director James Comey for additional information about the presence of classified information on the system of personal machines Clinton used.
{mosads}He also pushed for the FBI to create an unclassified version of the files it sent to Capitol Hill last week detailing its yearlong investigation, which could then be made public.
“What we’re asking the FBI in a letter today to do is create an unclassified version and then release that to the public,” Chaffetz said on Fox News Monday. “Let’s go ahead and get that out there sooner rather than later.”
“It’s so sensitive and so classified that even I, as the chairman of the Oversight Committee, don’t have the high level of clearance to see what’s in the materials,” he said during a separate appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“I think the documents are overly classified.”
Clinton’s presidential campaign has similarly suggested releasing the entire trove of material that the FBI sent to Congress last week. Otherwise, the campaign and its allies have feared, GOP lawmakers might be able to selectively leak embarrassing excerpts to the press.
It’s unclear whether the FBI will agree to the request to declassify the documents, which include summaries of interviews with Clinton and her senior aides.
Clinton’s troubling email history dominated the headlines on Monday with revelations that the FBI discovered approximately 15,000 new emails that Clinton had not handed over to the State Department for record-keeping purposes. A batch of new emails was also released Monday, seeming to show undue access to officials within the Clinton Foundation.
Separately, Clinton was confronted with criticism from former Secretary of State Colin Powell, who accused her of trying to blame him for her email practices.
In his Monday letter, Chaffetz pressed Comey about the fact that Clinton’s lawyers and IT aides, who did not have security clearances, had access to her server and thumb drive containing messages with classified information.
“Just as classified information may not be provided to anyone without an appropriate clearance, classified information must also not be stored on a computer system that is not authorized to store it,” he wrote.
Information about the storage of Clinton’s classified materials at her lawyers’ offices appeared not to be contained in the files the FBI gave to Congress last week. Chaffetz asked for it to be handed over.