Former US secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton should fully explain her actions involving the use of a private, non-government e-mail account when she was the nation’s top diplomat, Senator Dianne Feinstein said on Sunday, becoming the first major member of the Democratic Party to urge Clinton to share more details of the private account.
Feinstein said the former first lady and New York senator “needs to step up and come out and say exactly what the situation was,” adding that from “this point on, the silence is going to hurt her.”
However, Hillary Clinton’s husband, former US president Bill Clinton, avoided the controversy on Sunday morning.
Asked whether his wife was treated fairly, he replied: “I am not the one to judge that. I have an opinion, but I have a bias.”
“I should not be making news on this,” he said, in remarks reported on CNN.com.
Hillary Clinton has been criticized for her use of the private e-mail account and whether she complied with US federal rules requiring officials to retain their communications.
She said that she has turned over all relevant e-mails — totaling 55,000 pages — to the US Department of State for review.
Last week, the US House of Representatives committee investigating deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, issued subpoenas for her e-mails, and its chairman on Sunday said: “We are not entitled to everything. I do not want everything. I just want everything related to Libya and Benghazi.”
Representative Trey Gowdy, a Republican, said: “There are gaps of months and months and months” in the e-mails the committee had previously received... It is not up to [former] secretary Clinton to decide what is a public record and what is not,” he said.
Hillary Clinton is considered the front-runner for next year’s Democratic presidential nomination.
So far, a tweet has been her only comment on the e-mail controversy. She did not address the issue on Saturday night during an event in Coral Gables, Florida, for the Clinton Global Initiative University.
One of Hillary Clinton’s predecessors, former US secretary of state Colin Powell, on Sunday said that he has retained none of the e-mails sent from his personal e-mail account during his tenure at the department in the first administration of former US president George W. Bush.
“I do not have any to turn over,” he said on Sunday. “I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off.”
“A lot of the e-mails that came out of my personal account went into the State Department system. They were addressed to State Department employees and the state.gov domain, but I do not know if the servers [for] the State Department captured those or not,” he said.
Powell said that all the e-mails from his account were unclassified and most were “pretty benign, so I am not terribly concerned, even if they were able to recover them.”
Feinstein appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press, Gowdy was on CBS’ Face the Nation and Powell spoke on ABC’s This Week.
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