WASHINGTON — Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton advised a House Select Committee on Friday that she permanently deleted all emails from the private server she used to conduct official business, apparently after she was first asked by the State Department to turn them over, the panel’s chairman said Friday.

In response to a congressional subpoena, Clinton also said she would not allow an independent third party to analyze the server.

“Not only was the secretary the sole arbiter of what was a public record, she also summarily decided to delete all emails from her server, ensuring no one could check behind her analysis in the public interest,” Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said in a statement.

The disclosure raised the stakes in the controversy that has dogged the presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential front-runner for weeks, since it was revealed that she had used an email server, apparently located in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., to conduct government business during her tenure from 2009 to 2013 as the nation’s top diplomat.

Gowdy said Clinton’s attorney on Friday informed the committee that she “unilaterally decided to wipe her server clean and permanently delete all emails from her personal server.”

“While it is not clear precisely when Secretary Clinton decided to permanently delete all emails from her server, it appears she made the decision after Oct. 28, 2014, when the Department of State for the first time asked the secretary to return her public record to the department,” Gowdy said.

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Gowdy had previously called on Clinton to allow an independent arbiter to evaluate all emails on her server to determine which qualified as official business. But Clinton had refused through an attorney Friday to surrender the server for such a third-party review, Gowdy said. It was not immediately clear whether the emails still could be recovered from the server through cyberforensic procedures.

The congressman said that “in light of the secretary’s unprecedented email arrangement with herself and her decision nearly two years after she left office to permanently delete all emails,” and because of the matter’s import to the American people, the panel will work with House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio and other Republican leaders in considering its next steps.

“But it is clear Congress will need to speak with the former secretary about her email arrangement and the decision to permanently delete those emails,” he said.

Clinton said recently at the United Nations that, in hindsight, it would have been smarter to have conducted State Department business through a government server.

She said her attorneys had turned over 30,490 emails to the State Department in response to a request from the agency, but she deleted more than 32,000 emails she considered personal.


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