Top US Republican Lawmaker To Launch New Investigation Of Clinton Emails: ABC

(Reuters) - Representative John Boehner, the top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, plans to announce a new investigation this week into Hillary Clinton’s use of email when she led the State Department, ABC News reported on Sunday.

ABC's "This Week" program said top Republicans had briefed it about Boehner's plans, but did not give details.

Clinton, expected to launch her campaign soon for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, has faced a storm of criticism over her email habits. She used a personal email address instead of a government one, as well as a personal server, during the period she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

Clinton told a news conference on Tuesday her private email address was a "convenience" so she would not have to carry two mobile devices. She sent and received 62,320 emails while at the State Department and after a review process, 30,490 were provided to the department at its request, a Clinton spokesman said last week. The remaining 31,830 were private and personal records, the spokesman said.

Clinton's use of a personal email address surfaced as multiple congressional panels investigated the 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, during her State Department tenure.

Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, the head of a special House committee examining Benghazi, has said he would like Clinton to testify about her email practices before Congress by April.

Gowdy told "Fox News Sunday" that the panel received eight emails when it first made its request to the State Department for Clinton's correspondence related to Benghazi in August 2014. The panel received another 300 emails in February.

"But who gets to decide what's personal and what's public? And if it's a mixed-use email and lots of emails we get in life are both personal and some work, I just can't trust her lawyers to make the determination that the public is getting everything they're entitled to," Gowdy said.

A Clinton spokesman was not immediately available to comment.