Republican Leaders Won’t Back Smith’s Probe of Clinton Emails

Sci­ence, Space, and Tech­no­logy Chair­man Lamar Smith is prob­ing wheth­er private con­tract­ors who set up Clin­ton’s serv­er at her New York home fol­lowed fed­er­al cy­ber­se­cur­ity guidelines. But Mc­Carthy said he be­lieves the mat­ter to be un­der the pur­view of Rep. Trey Gowdy’s Se­lect Com­mit­tee on Benghazi.

“I have the same im­pres­sion as you, that it would be Gowdy’s jur­is­dic­tion,” Mc­Carthy said, de­clin­ing to an­swer wheth­er Smith had pre-cleared the in­vest­ig­a­tion with lead­er­ship.

Smith’s of­fice also de­clined to an­swer wheth­er he no­ti­fied party lead­ers be­fore send­ing let­ters ask­ing for more in­form­a­tion to four private com­pan­ies that helped set up the Chap­paqua, New York serv­er. But Smith spokes­man Zachary Kurz said the chair­man is fol­low­ing up on a cy­ber­se­cur­ity hear­ing he held last month.

“Dur­ing the hear­ing, the chair­man had an ex­change with a private-sec­tor wit­ness who stated un­equi­voc­ally that a fed­er­al of­fi­cial us­ing a private serv­er and email ad­dress as her of­fi­cial gov­ern­ment email risked ex­pos­ing clas­si­fied data and that his com­pany wouldn’t do it be­cause of fed­er­al laws and cy­ber­se­cur­ity guidelines,” Kurz said. “Based on that testi­mony, the chair­man de­term­ined that fur­ther over­sight was ne­ces­sary.”

Smith is fa­cing a primary chal­lenge this fall from a tea-party-backed chal­lenger, Matt Mc­Call, who failed to un­seat him last year. The Cook Polit­ic­al Re­port rates the dis­trict an R+12, mean­ing it is solidly Re­pub­lic­an. The Texas del­eg­a­tion was shaken last year when 17-term Rep. Ral­ph Hall sur­pris­ingly lost his primary elec­tion in a run­off to former U.S. At­tor­ney John Ratcliffe.

The Clin­ton in­vest­ig­a­tion has been a sens­it­ive top­ic since its in­cep­tion, and es­pe­cially since Mc­Carthy was roundly cri­ti­cized for in­sinu­at­ing on tele­vi­sion that the Benghazi Com­mit­tee has suc­ceeded in polit­ic­ally dam­aging Clin­ton—com­ments he later re­trac­ted.

Former Speak­er John Boehner had launched the Benghazi com­mit­tee to stream­line the in­vest­ig­a­tion and avoid a patch­work of probes in­to the Benghazi at­tacks. He also en­sured that after news of Clin­ton’s private email serv­er came to light, in­quiry in­to the setup would re­main with the Benghazi pan­el. But with Boehner re­tired and his suc­cessor, Speak­er Paul Ry­an, prom­ising wider lat­it­ude to com­mit­tee chairs, there ap­pears to be less cent­ral­ized con­trol.

Mc­Carthy’s latest com­ments ar­rive amid in­tense in­terest in Clin­ton’s emails among Re­pub­lic­ans, es­pe­cially in light of new State De­part­ment rev­el­a­tions sev­er­al days ago.

On Fri­day the State De­part­ment said it was with­hold­ing sev­en email threads total­ing 37 pages from its latest re­lease of Clin­ton’s emails be­cause they con­tain a “cat­egory of top secret in­form­a­tion.” However, the de­part­ment said the mes­sages were not marked clas­si­fied when they were sent.

Clin­ton’s cam­paign at­tacked the de­cision to with­hold the mes­sages, call­ing it “over-clas­si­fic­a­tion run amok.”

“We un­der­stand that these emails were likely ori­gin­ated on the State De­part­ment’s un­clas­si­fied sys­tem be­fore they were ever shared with Sec­ret­ary Clin­ton, and they have re­mained on the de­part­ment’s un­clas­si­fied sys­tem for years,” said Bri­an Fal­lon, Clin­ton’s press sec­ret­ary.

Clin­ton’s email setup is already un­der in­vest­ig­a­tion by the Sen­ate Ju­di­ciary Com­mit­tee and Home­land Se­cur­ity Com­mit­tee. Days after Smith an­nounced his probe, House Over­sight and Gov­ern­ment Re­form Com­mit­tee Chair­man Jason Chaf­fetz an­nounced that he was look­ing in­to wheth­er the State De­part­ment ob­struc­ted Free­dom of In­form­a­tion Act Re­quests un­der Clin­ton’s ten­ure.

The Benghazi pan­el’s probe played a key role un­cov­er­ing Clin­ton’s use of a private serv­er, al­though that probe is more dir­ectly fo­cused on the 2012 at­tacks in Libya.