As GOP lawmakers become increasingly convinced that the Obama administration will let Hillary Clinton off the hook for her email usage as secretary of state, the Senate's No. 2 Republican has asked Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the Democratic presidential front-runner.
Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn asked Lynch in a Tuesday letter to appoint a special counsel, claiming it could be a conflict of interest for Clinton's former colleagues to conduct an investigation into her use of a private email system, reported Politico.
"The Attorney General has a special duty to pursue justice even when political considerations run counter to doing so. At critical times in our nation's history, your predecessors have exercised that duty by appointing politically-independent individuals to investigate potential wrongdoing involving senior administration officials ... Americans deserve the assurance that justice - and justice alone - is being pursued," Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general and Texas Supreme Court justice, wrote in the letter.
He continued, "Secretary Clinton denied publicly that she transmitted classified information and violated government policy, both of which proved untrue. Secretary Clinton's lawyers made their own determinations as to which of the emails on her server were government records and deleted the remainder - tens of thousands of documents. And the former campaign staffer who set up the server, who would subsequently be employed both by the State Department and Secretary Clinton privately, has invoked the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution to avoid providing information to government investigators."
Some worry that Clinton's deep political connections, along with her decent chance of appearing on the 2016 Democratic presidential ticket, could inhibit a fair Justice Department investigation, according to Politico.
As The Washington Times notes, the Justice Department already faces a conflict of interest, since it is both defending Clinton's email practices in court and at the same time investigating her use of the private system she had set up in her New York home and used exclusively during her tenure as the nation's top diplomat.
The FBI has reportedly asked its "A-team" to conduct an "extremely serious" investigation into a possible violation of the Espionage Act, and some sources have said the investigation is criminal in nature, as HNGN previously reported.
Cornyn said that aside from the mishandling of classified information, Clinton also thwarted the Freedom of Information Act by storing her emails outside of the State Department for six years and then personally deciding which to delete and which to return to the government for record-keeping purposes.
Nearly two years after leaving the department, Clinton finally turned over some 30,000 work-related emails, and without independent oversight, deleted another 30,000 that she deemed personal in nature.
Clinton insists that she followed all laws in place, which the Justice Department says give employees the right to sort through emails themselves. Clinton also maintains that she did not send any information that was marked classified at the time.
