U.S. House committee requests Hillary Clinton hand over email server

The Congressional committee investigating the Benghazi attacks on Friday officially asked Hillary Clinton to turn her private email server to a neutral party for assessments.

"I am formally requesting Secretary Clinton make her server available to a neutral, detached and independent third-party for immediate inspection and review," the committee chairman, Republican of South Carolina, Trey Gowdy wrote in a letter to Clinton's lawyer. Gowdy also suggested the State Department's Office of Inspector General as a possible third party.

"The House of Representatives and the American people are entitled to a complete accounting of the secretary's office record during her time as secretary of State," he wrote.

Clinton has argued that her lawyers examined all of the emails she sent and received on the personal account when she was secretary of state and handed over the ones they thought to be government records to the State Department. She also said the emails her lawyers deemed personal were then deleted.

While Gowdy has said that the server needs to be checked because the committee has big gaps in the emails it has from Clinton's personal email, and that Congress needs to have " objective assurances" that it has all of her information.

Gowdy also warned that refusing to hand over the server could lead to action by the House to force Clinton to do so.

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.

The exposure of Clinton closely guarding her emails posed not only a public relations crisis for a promising Democratic presidential candidate for 2016 elections, but also a possible legal investigation into whether her practice had broken laws. Endite