A third, former State Department staffer Bryan Pagliano, who played a key role in setting up the server, did not show up to testify before the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee.
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One of Hillary Clinton’s aides who helped maintain her private e-mail server didn’t attend a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Tuesday despite a subpoena, while two other computer technicians invoked their Fifth Amendment rights not to answer questions.
He didn’t specify what the penalties would be but says, “We’re not letting go of this”.
At Tuesday’s hearing, two other witnesses, Bill Thornton and Paul Combetta, both employees of Platte River Networks, an outside data storage company the Clintons used to maintain their email records, invoked their Fifth Amendment rights continually and were eventually excused from the hearing.
The ex-Clinton staffer plead the Fifth previous year when he was questioned by the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
The document was served after Herring told the committee that he could not commit to providing Congress with the FBI’s full report on Hillary Clinton’s email server without redactions of personally-identifiable information.
“Mr. Pagliano has chosen to evade a subpoena duly issued by the committee of the United States House of Representatives”.
Democrats on the panel dismissed Chaffetz’s theatrics at the emergency hearing and insisted the sole objective of the hearing was to undermine Clinton’s presidential bid.
Justin Cooper, a former employee of Bill Clinton’s and the Clinton Foundation, helped set up and run the server from 2009 through 2013 in the basement of the Clintons’ home in NY. The lawyers said Pagliano had already appeared before a different Congressional committee and made it clear he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights.
“We decide what’s relevant – not the Department of Justice, not the FBI”, Chaffetz said.
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Cooper told the committee that he did not have a security clearance during the period he was performing this work. He said he considered that to be a “good practice”, even as some Republican lawmakers expressed their skepticism. Combetta is believed to be the individual who deleted backup servers that contained Clinton’s emails after Congress issued a preservation order. He told lawmakers that he couldn’t say whether any secret information had been purloined by foreign hackers or that USA national security had been compromised.
