America
Republican leadership calls for "third party" review on Clinton's emails
Washington, March 18
US House Speaker John
Boehner urged former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to turn over her
personal email server to a neutral third party and let it decide what
should be released to the public.
"The American people deserve
all the facts about what happened in Benghazi," said Boehner at a press
conference on Tuesday, referring to the 2012 deadly incident on the US
diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans, including
US Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, died, Xinhua reported.
"That's
why it's so important for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to turn
over her personal server to a neutral third party, " Boehner said.
"I
think that is the fairest way to make sure that we have all the
documents that belong to the public, and ultimately all the facts," he
added.
US news outlets revealed earlier this month that Clinton
did not use an official email address while taking the helm at the US
State Department. Instead, she dealt with daily business on a private
account exclusively.
The Clinton team also set up her own email server to fully control who could have the access to those emails.
In
her own defence, Clinton said on March 10, a whole week after the first
exposure of her emailing habits, that the use of personal email account
for official communications was "for convenience".
Clinton said
she had already turned over 55,000 pages work- related emails to the
State Department and deleted some of her personal emails.
She
also claimed since she sent the emails to other officials at their State
Department email addresses, those emails were automatically archived on
the State Department server.
However, State Department
spokesperson on Friday admitted to reporters that the email traffic of
other senior State Department officials was not automatically or
routinely archived till February.
The loose record-keeping
practice raises possibilities that many emails have already been
destroyed unless individual officials had saved their emails regularly.
The
exposure of Clinton closely guarding her emails posed not only a public
relations crisis for a potential Democratic presidential candidate for
2016 elections, but also threatened a possible legal investigation into
whether her practice had broken laws.