Sarah Westwood, investigative reporter at the Washington Examiner, joined Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway on The Federalist Radio Hour to discuss this week’s House Oversight Committee hearings on the FBI’s meeting with Hillary Clinton and Colin Powell’s hacked emails.
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They refused to answer questions from House lawmakers, invoking their right to remain silent under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
145-a-10-(Representative Jason Chaffetz (CHAY’-fihts), R-Utah, chairman, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, during hearing)-“just not acceptable”-House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz says Bryan Pagliano will pay a price for not showing up at the hearing after being subpoenaed”.
“Any effort to require Mr. Pagliano to publicly appear this week and again assert his Fifth Amendment rights before a committee of the same Congress, inquiring about the same matter as the Benghazi Committee, furthers no legislative goal and is a transparent effort to publicly harass and humiliate our client for unvarnished political purposes”, the letter states, according to the newspaper.
“I want to read the agreement between the Department of Justice and this witness and whether that agreement requires this witness to cooperate with other entities of government – that is commonplace”, Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said in a heated exchange between Republicans and Democrats. Chaffetz said Pagliano didn’t disclose that he was being paid by the Clintons while he was also on the State Department’s payroll. Unbeknownst to the most people at the State Department, however, Pagliano had a secret job on the side maintaining Clinton’s “homebrew” e-mail server, which was kept in the basement of her Chappaqua home, allowing her to send e-mails that were not captured by State Department servers.
Chaffetz is the chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
One witness, Justin Cooper, a one-time technology aide to Clinton and her husband, former president Bill Clinton, answered the committee’s questions.
He issued the subpoena to Jason Herring, the acting assistant director for congressional affairs.
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After the exchanges in open session, the committee voted to go behind closed doors to further question the agency officials. Comey told bureau employees in an internal memo that it wasn’t a close call. “They happened with some limited frequency over the period of I’d say the last two and a half years while she was in office, but we had developed systems to tamper these down”.
