U.S. House Speaker John Boehner on Tuesday urged former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to turn over her personal email server to a neutral third party and let it decide what should be released to the public.
"The American people deserve all the facts about what happened in Benghazi," said Boehner at a press conference, referring to the 2012 deadly incident on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, died.
"That's why it's so important for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to turn over her personal server to a neutral third party, " Boehner said. "I think that is the fairest way to make sure that we have all the documents that belong to the public, and ultimately all the facts."
U.S. news outlets revealed earlier this month that Clinton did not use an official email address while taking the helm at the U.S. State Department. Instead, she dealt with daily business on a private account exclusively. The Clinton team also set up her own email server to fully control who could have the access to those emails.
In her own defense, Clinton said on March 10, a whole week after the first exposure of her emailing habits, that the use of personal email account for official communications was "for convenience".
Clinton said she had already turned over 55,000 pages work- related emails to the State Department and deleted some of her personal emails.
She also claimed since she sent the emails to other officials at their State Department email addresses, those emails were automatically archived on the State Department server.
However, State Department spokeswoman on Friday admitted to reporters that the email traffic of other senior State Department officials was not automatically or routinely archived till February.
The loose record-keeping practice raises possibilities that many emails have already been destroyed unless individual officials had saved their emails regularly.
The exposure of Clinton closely guarding her emails posed not only a public relations crisis for a potential Democratic presidential candidate for 2016 elections, but also threatened a possible legal investigation into whether her practice had broken laws.