WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has discovered a chain of emails that Hillary Clinton failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of work-related correspondence as secretary of State, officials told The Associated Press on Friday, adding to questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner's unusual usage of a private email account and server while in government.
The messages were exchanged with retired Gen. David Petraeus when he headed the military's U.S. Central Command, responsible for running 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 handed over all her work emails from the account.
Republicans have raised questions about thousands of emails that she has deleted on grounds that they were private, as well as messages that have surfaced independently of Clinton and the State Department. Speaking of her emails on CBS' “Face the Nation” this week, Clinton said, “We provided all of them.” But the FBI and several congressional committees are investigating.
The State Department's record of Clinton emails begins on March 18, 2009 — almost two months after she entered office. Before then, Clinton has said she used an old AT&T Blackberry email account, the contents of which she no longer can access.
The Petraeus emails, discovered by the Defense Department and 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 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.
