House Speaker John Boehner on Sunday accused Hillary Clinton of lying about her obligations to hand over email correspondence from her tenure as secretary of state.
"She's not telling the truth," Boehner, R-Ohio, said on CBS's "Face the Nation" on Sunday. "She had an obligation to turn these emails over."
"Our committees asked for her emails going back to 2012, and we've been rolled and rolled and held off and held off now for over three years," he continued. "The emails need to come forward."
During her time as secretary of state, Clinton exclusively used a private email account and server to conduct official federal business, and then years later, unilaterally decided to delete about half of the emails before turning the remaining 30,000 over to the Department of State in December for official record-keeping purposes.
The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which is investigating the 2012 terrorist attacks on the diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, sent Clinton a subpoena on March 4, 2015 for all emails related to the attacks.
Even though Clinton's attorney David Kendall later confirmed the receipt of the subpoena, in an interview with CNN last week, Clinton said that she never received a subpoena requesting her to hand over her emails related to Benghazi.
Clinton went on to tell CNN that she wasn't obligated to turn over her emails, but did so because she wanted "to go above and beyond what was expected" of her.
"Everything I did was permitted by law and regulation," Clinton told CNN. "I had one device. When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system. Now, I didn't have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me because I knew the vast majority of everything that was official already was in the State Department system."
But as the Daily Caller previously reported, a 2014 memo sent to State Department officials detailed a policy in place since 2009 requiring outgoing officials to hand over email records when they leave office.
Boehner said Clinton was being dishonest, not only about the subpoena, but also about her responsibility to relinquish all emails to the State Department upon leaving office.
Boehner said that her emails are vital to the committee's investigation into the Benghazi attacks, which left U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead.
He added that he hasn't ruled issuing another subpoena for Clinton's email server so that an attempt can be made to recover the deleted emails, but also said that the State Department's inspector general should ideally be the one pursuing the emails, rather than Congress.
"I'm not going to rule in or out any of those options. I would hope we wouldn't have to do that. She wants this investigation over, she wants ... this all to be cleaned up. But the fact is, it's not going to be cleaned up until we get the emails," he told CBS.
"I would hope they would turn them over or the State Department would go after the server. Congress doesn't want the server," he added. "The State Department IG is the appropriate group of people to go through these emails to make those determinations."
