House Select Committee on Benghazi member Rep. Mike Pompeo, R-Kan., admonished Hillary Clinton Friday for purposefully withholding all or part of 15 emails from her private email server.
"The State Department has now confirmed that former Secretary Clinton failed to turn over documents she had related to Benghazi and Libya. She did not want the American people to know the truth," Pompeo said in a statement Friday night.
"The fact that Clinton withheld information that could help this committee uncover all of the facts about what happened to cause the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi is absolutely unacceptable. This is not about politics. This is about transparency, accountability and keeping Americans safe."
The State Department confirmed earlier this week that it could not find in its records the 15 emails that Clinton adviser Sidney Blumenthal turned over to the House Benghazi panel earlier this month.
Clinton previously relinquished roughly 30,000 work-related emails to her former agency that were stored on her private home-based server during her tenure. Almost as many emails were unilaterally deleted by Clinton after she deemed them personal in nature. However, the new batch of roughly 60 Blumenthal memos were, in fact, work-related, yet were never turned over.
The memos predate the Sept. 11, 2012 terrorist attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans.
Republican Benghazi committee members subpoenaed Clinton's emails, hoping that her correspondence could provide a clearer picture of what transpired in the days leading up to the attack, according to The Washington Post.
"If Sidney Blumenthal had not retained copies of these documents and provided them to the committee, Americans would never have known about the scope of the private, unvetted intelligence that Clinton was receiving about conditions on the ground in Libya," Pompeo said.
"We now do. This, of course, begs the question of what other information Clinton did not provide in response to our congressional inquiry, and confirms the need for a neutral, independent, third party to be given access to Clinton's private, non-government server that provided the sole email communications link to her during her time as secretary of state."
State Department spokesman John Kirby said Friday that there will be no internal probe into why Clinton didn't turn over all work-related emails.
