Hours before former secretary of state Hillary Clinton appeared before reporters, Democrats on the House Select Committee on Benghazi placed a priority on releasing emails related to their investigation of events surrounding the 2012 terror attack on the U.S. consulate.
"Since the Department has already produced approximately 850 pages of these documents to the Select Committee on Benghazi, we request that the Department begin its review for public release with this subset of 850 pages of Benghazi-related documents in order to make them available to the public first without waiting for the full review of all 55,000 pages of documents,"
all five Democratic members of the committee wrote in a letter to the State Department.
The State Department has turned over 55,000 emails related to Clinton's tenure, but the Democrats want a priority placed on those that pertain to Benghazi and they want all of the emails made public simultaneously, rather than selectively released.
The controversy over Clinton's decision to forgo use of an official State Department email address is the latest development in the committee's investigation of the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate's activities in the hours and days after the attacks.
On Monday,
White House Spokesman Josh Earnest acknowledged that the president did exchange emails with Clinton, but contended he did not know the account was private.
"The President, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his Secretary of State. I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email one another. And the point that the President was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address
— he did
— but he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act," said Earnest during his daily press briefing.
The Select Committee issued a subpoena for all of Clinton's emails related to Benghazi on March 4,
according to a committee press release.
However, Select Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy told CBS News that there are "huge gaps" in the emails which have already been turned over to the committee.
"I don't want everything. I just want everything related to Libya and Benghazi," Gowdy said Sunday on
CBS News' "Face the Nation."
Gowdy added that it "strains credibility" to contend no emails were sent by Clinton in the days leading up to and during a 2011 trip to Libya.
"We have no emails from that trip. It strains credibility to believe that if you're on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy, that there's not a single document that's been turned over to Congress. So there are huge gaps," the South Carolina Republican said.
Last week, it also was learned that Clinton aides Philippe Reines and Cheryl Mills apparently were "running interference internally during the 2012 attacks.
According to Fox News reporter Catherine Herridge, the emails, which were obtained through a federal lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch, show that Mills instructed then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland to cease answering questions from the media concerning the whereabouts of Ambassador Chris Stevens, who was killed in the attack.
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