Hillary Clinton was hit with three new revelations about her private email network Tuesday evening, reviving questions about her conduct as secretary of state.
First, the Washington Post discovered Clinton did not turn over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department in response to a routine records-keeping request, as she has previously stated.
Clinton has said in the past that the agency was simply asking all former secretaries of state to hand over any potential federal records they might have when they requested her emails in October of last year. She submitted her records in December 2014.
But the State Department said Tuesday they only asked Clinton for her emails after discovering, for the first time, her use of a private server.
“In the process of responding to congressional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton,”John Kirby, State Department spokesman, told the Post. “State Department officials contacted her representatives during the summer of 2014 to learn more about her email use and the status of emails in that account.”
Clinton had never mentioned that agency officials reached out to her months before they formally requested all her emails so they could respond to subpoenas from the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
The committee, which has struggled to obtain documents from the State Department given the fact that, for months, they did not have Clinton’s emails, apparently never received copies of 13 Benghazi-related emails the agency is presently withholding in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Court filings in a FOIA case brought by Citizens United, a conservative watchdog group, indicate the State Department is refusing to release the 13 emails that include internal discussions among Clinton aides about how to handle congressional requests related to Benghazi.
David Bossie, president of Citizens United, said the select committee had not received copies of the emails described in court documents.
Hours later, a Bloomberg report indicated the FBI had recovered deleted emails off Clinton’s private server.
Clinton has said she turned over all work-related emails and deleted the rest, which she deemed personal. Of roughly 60,000 emails, the Democratic presidential candidate said half were of a personal nature.
Although the number of personal emails recovered was not immediately clear, the report said FBI investigators have been passing along the government communications they pull off the server as they complete the process.
Clinton affirmed in a sworn declaration filed in federal court Aug. 8 that she turned over all work-related emails to the government.
If the FBI recovers work-related emails that were deleted rather than provided to the State Department, Clinton could potentially face legal consequences, given her declaration.
Platte River Networks, the technology company that has managed Clinton’s server network since 2013, said it did not think Clinton had “wiped” the device. Wiping the server would have decreased the likelihood that deleted messages could ever be salvaged.
The FBI’s investigation is expected to drag on for several more months as investigators examine the extent of classified information that was handled on the personal network.
Law enforcement officials have said the probe is not focused on Clinton herself, and the former secretary has insisted it is not a criminal investigation but a “security inquiry.”
The new revelations came as an apparent surprise to Clinton, who was asked about the Post story during an editorial board meeting with the Des Moines Register on Tuesday.
When confronted with the details of the story, which suggested she and the State Department had given conflicting accounts of how the agency obtained her emails, Clinton said, “You’re telling me something I don’t know.”
“I don’t know that. I can’t answer that,” she said, according to the Register. “All I know is that they sent the same letter to everybody. That’s my understanding.”
