WASHINGTON -- Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton should fully explain her actions involving the use of a private, nongovernment email account when she was the country's top diplomat, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California said Sunday, becoming the first major Democrat to urge Clinton to share more details of the private account.
"What I would like is for her to come forward and say just what the situation is, because she is the pre-eminent political figure right now," Feinstein said on NBC's Meet the Press. The senator called Clinton the "leading candidate" for president.
Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not accuse Clinton of any wrongdoing, but she suggested that Clinton "needs to step up and come out and state exactly what the situation is." She added: "I think from this point on the silence is going to hurt her."
Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton, avoided the controversy Sunday morning.
Asked whether his wife was treated fairly, Bill Clinton replied, "I'm not the one to judge that. I have an opinion, but I have a bias.
"I shouldn't be making news on this," he said, in remarks reported on CNN.com.
Hillary Clinton has been criticized for her use of the private email account and whether she complied with federal rules requiring officials to retain their communications. Clinton says that she's turned over all relevant emails -- totaling 55,000 pages -- to the State Department for review.
Last week, the House committee investigating the Benghazi, Libya, attacks, issued subpoenas for Clinton's emails, and the chairman said Sunday, "We're not entitled to everything. I don't want everything. I just want everything related to Libya and Benghazi."
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., said "there are gaps of months and months and months" in the emails the committee had previously received. "It's not up to Secretary Clinton to decide what's a public record and what's not," he said on CBS' Face The Nation.
He said he's received no emails from a day when Clinton was photographed on a trip to Libya using her BlackBerry.
"It strains credibility to believe that if you're on your way to Libya to discuss Libyan policy, that there's not a single document that has been turned over to Congress," Gowdy said.
Members of the committee tussled Sunday over whether they should release the committee's cache of messages from Clinton's private email account.
Gowdy said he didn't plan to release the emails because "we don't have all of them."
Democratic committee member Adam Schiff of California said Republicans' call for more emails amounts to grandstanding and is the result of pressure from GOP organizations.
"She was giving us everything we asked for," he said on CNN's State of the Union. "Nothing changed, except that the pressure on the Republican members of the committee this week became too great for them to resist from the Stop Hillary PAC people and the RNC people."
Schiff was joined defending Clinton by Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, who said on CBS that in six months the controversy will look like "a slight hiccup, a small bump in the road."
Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who also investigated the Benghazi attack when he led the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, said Clinton did not "break a law for which there is a penalty" and defended the committee's move to issue subpoenas.
"A subpoena, which Trey Gowdy issued, is so that in fact it will be a crime if she knowingly withholds documents pursuant to subpoena," Issa said on CNN.
Double standard?
Clinton faced new allegations Sunday that she applied a double standard in the use of private email at the State Department.
Scott Gration, a former U.S. ambassador to Kenya, was forced to resign while Clinton was secretary partly because he used private email for public work, according to a 2012 report by the State Department's inspector general.
In addition to creating a security risk, "The use of unauthorized information systems can also result in the loss of official public records as these systems do not have approved record preservation or backup functions," the report said.
"As I was going through it, I did not perceive that it was a double standard because I did not know of Secretary Clinton's use of a commercial email account," Gration said on CNN's State of the Union. "But as I've reflected on it in the last couple days, it does appear like there was a different standard that was used in my case and that has been used in hers."
The policy against using private email in most cases "should apply to all of us, since we were all in the State Department," he said.
Gration, a retired Air Force officer, joined the administration after supporting President Barack Obama's 2008 candidacy and also served as Sudan envoy.
A Clinton spokesman said in a statement to CNN that the circumstances surrounding Gration's ouster had been well-documented by the State Department's inspector general.
Clinton is considered the front-runner for the Democratic party's 2016 presidential nomination, but hasn't entered the race yet.
Clinton said in a Twitter message Wednesday that she wanted the State Department to publicly release the entire email archive she provided to the department. The State Department warned such an effort would take time. She did not address the issue Saturday night during an event in Coral Gables, Fla., for the Clinton Global Initiative University.
Potential presidential candidate Lindsey Graham said he has never sent a single message using the technology.
"I don't email," the Republican senator said on NBC's Meet the Press. "You can have every email I've ever sent."
Graham said the controversy over Clinton's use of private email raised questions about other Obama Cabinet officials' practices. Among that group, Graham appears to have had some company. Former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in 2013 that she didn't use email, calling it "inefficient" and a time suck.
One of Clinton's predecessors, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, said Sunday he has retained none of the emails sent from his personal email account during his tenure at the department in the first George W. Bush administration.
"I don't have any to turn over," he said Sunday on ABC's This Week. "I did not keep a cache of them. I did not print them off."
Powell added: "A lot of the emails 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 don't know if the servers (for) the State Department captured those or not."
Powell said all the emails from his account were unclassified and most were "pretty benign, so I'm not terribly concerned even if they were able to recover them."
Great secretary of state
Obama said Saturday he first learned through news reports last week that Clinton was using a personal email account for official business.
In his first remarks on the controversy during an interview with Bill Plante of CBS News, Obama declined to say whether he was disappointed or whether he faulted Clinton.
"She was a great secretary of state for me," Obama said in an excerpt of the interview released by the network. "The policy of my administration is to encourage transparency, which is why my emails -- the BlackBerry I carry around -- all those records are available and archived."
The interview was recorded Saturday in Alabama, where Obama was commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Selma civil-rights march.
Obama did not address how he could have avoided noticing that Clinton was sending emails from a "clintonemail.com" address throughout the years she served in his administration.
Asked how Clinton's email practices met the standards of transparency that he has repeatedly called for, Obama said that "the fact that she is going to be putting them forward will allow us to make sure that people have the information they need."
Obama officials have faced a barrage of questions over why Clinton was allowed to maintain a private email server, and whether the former secretary of state turned over all the communications required under federal record-keeping laws. The New York Times reported the private email account Monday.
White House officials have said in recent days that some in the West Wing were aware that Clinton was not using an official "state.gov" email address for official correspondence. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, has repeatedly said the guidance from administration lawyers is that employees should use their government-issued email addresses for their official business.
Earnest said officials made a reasonable assumption that she was complying with the federal records act. He said such a matter probably wouldn't be brought to the president.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press; by Sean Sullivan of The Washington Post; by Justin Sink, David Lerman, Angela Greiling Keane, Ben Brody and Ali Elkin of Bloomberg News; and by Michael D. Shear of The New York Times.
A Section on 03/09/2015