Congressional Republicans last month issued subpoenas to Platte River Networks and two other companies Datto Inc. and SECNAP Network Security Corp.
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After the exchanges in open session, the committee voted to go behind closed doors to further question the agency officials.
In 2014, Clinton released over 55,000 emails to State Department investigators, stating that the documents contained only work-related information.
Republicans have said the documents “did not constitute a complete investigative file”.
“I get to see it all”, Rep. Jason Chaffetz of Utah said before issuing the subpoena to Jason Herring, the FBI’s acting assistant director for congressional affairs, during a committee hearing Monday.
“I guess this is what happens when you try to schedule a public attack against Hillary Clinton for every day of the week – you get frantic, and you swap substantive discussions for set-up hearings and cheap press hits”, Ranking Member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) said in his opening statement.
FBI Director James Comey last week defended the decision to forgo criminal charges against Clinton after a yearlong probe into whether she mishandled classified information that flowed through the private email system located in her NY home.
The panel made a decision to hold part of its hearing in private late Monday – witnesses from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency declined to answer certain questions in public – though Mr. Cummings said Republicans first wanted to make a show of the proceedings for political gain.
“We’re going to keep going at this, full speed ahead”, he said.
“The FBI said there were three emails that did contain the “(C)” marking indicating the information was classified at the time it was sent or received, though Mr. Comey testified last month that Mrs. Clinton, a former secretary of state, US senator and first lady, might not have been sophisticated enough to understand the markings or the sensitive nature of the information.
The documents from the FBI’s file are being stored in a secure unit known by USA intelligence officials as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF. Herring and six other Obama administration officials appeared before the committee to discuss the investigative files. Doing otherwise, he said, would risk “a chilling effect” that might discourage witnesses from cooperating with investigations. In a September 9 letter, Cummings accused the chairman of using the committee’s resources and taxpayer dollars “to engage in an astonishing onslaught of political attacks” against Clinton.
In a September 9 letter, Cummings also called the accusations Clinton lied to Congress “ludicrous” and part of a Republican pattern involving Clinton: “accuse, investigate, fail, repeat”.
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The chairman also told the Federal Bureau of Investigation to disclose unclassified portions of the investigative file to the public, though he commended the Federal Bureau of Investigation for already releasing its investigative summary report and Mrs. Clinton’s 302 interview summary.
