He was particularly irked by Pagliano’s decision not to appear, despite having been subpoenaed.
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Chaffetz said he’s deadly serious about the security questions he’s asking, and about the subpoena ignored by Pagliano.
Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the committee’s ranking Democrat, defended the decision of the technicians and Pagliano to assert their right to remain silent, saying, “This committee is abusing taxpayer dollars and the authority of Congress in an astonishing onslaught of political attacks to damage Secretary Clinton’s campaign”. Cooper also helped establish a separate private server for Clinton during her tenure as secretary of State that was maintained by the Colorado-based company Platte River Networks, which he referred to as the “Pagliano server”. He then deleted the files using a software program known as BleachBit, which later complicated efforts to recover the data, according to an Federal Bureau of Investigation report and a source familiar with its findings.
“The point of today’s hearing is to investigate baseless Republican accusations that Secretary Clinton or her aides ordered the destruction of emails to hide them from investigators”.
A fourth witness, Justin Cooper, testified for more than two hours about his role setting up the email system in 2009 while he worked as an aide to the Clinton family.
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On Monday, Pagliano’s attorneys sharply criticized a new subpoena issued Thursday evening by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, for Pagliano to appear on two business days’ notice with two information technology workers to answer questions about why a Clinton email archive was deleted, according to a letter obtained by the Washington Post. FBI Director James Comey said agents found 110 emails that contained classified information. He told lawmakers that he couldn’t say whether any secret information had been purloined by foreign hackers or that US national security had been compromised. Comey was appearing before the committee to explain his finding that no reasonable prosecutor would bring a criminal case against Hillary Clinton, even though she and her staff were extremely careless in their handling of highly classified information. Pagliano, who joined the State Department with Clinton but also was paid privately by her for working on her server, was given a form of immunity from prosecution in 2015 for cooperating with a federal investigation into the mishandling of classified information over the server.
