Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not turn over all of her work-related emails as she originally claimed, the Obama administration has discovered.
Last month, acting in response to a request from a federal judge, Clinton certified under penalty of perjury that she had turned over all of her work-related email correspondence to the State Department.
But the Associated Press is reporting today that the Obama administration has discovered a chain of work-related emails that Hillary failed to turn over.
The messages were exchanged with retired Gen. David Petraeus when he headed the military’s U.S. Central Command, responsible for running the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They began before Clinton entered office and continued into her first days at the State Department. They largely pertained to personnel matters and don’t appear to deal with highly classified material, officials said, but their existence challenges Clinton’s claim that she has handed over the entirety of her work emails from the account.
During an appearance on CBS News’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Clinton insisted she had turned over all of her work-related emails. “We provided all of them,” she said.
The Petraeus emails, first discovered by the Defense Department and then passed to the State Department’s inspector general, challenge that claim. They start on Jan. 10, 2009, with Clinton using the older email account. But by Jan. 28 — a week after her swearing in — she switched to using the private email address on a homebrew server that she would rely on for the rest of her tenure. There are less than 10 emails back and forth in total, officials said, and the chain ends on Feb. 1.
The officials weren’t authorized to speak on the matter and demanded anonymity. But State Department spokesman John Kirby confirmed that the agency received the emails in the “last several days” and that they “were not previously in the possession of the department.”
Clinton deleted roughly 30,000 emails which she claimed were all personal in nature, but her campaign’s claim that her server had been “wiped clean” was apparently a ruse.
Today’s AP report confirms Bloomberg’s reporting from earlier this week that the FBI has been able to recover from Hillary’s private computer server both personal and work-related e-mails from her time as secretary of state.
The State Department also announced Friday that it is sending the House Benghazi committee nearly 1,000 email exchanges from Hillary’s private account.
A senior State Department official said the decision to provide the new set of about 925 emails is linked to Clinton’s expected testimony to the panel next month and to a clearer understanding by State officials that Congressional investigators want all Libya-related records, not just those involving security issues related to the deadly 2012 attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi.
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