State Department seeks more work-related emails from Clinton
WASHINGTON (AP) - The State Department is leaning on former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton to hand over any additional work-related emails sent or received using private accounts.
In a letter made public in a court filing Tuesday, Undersecretary Patrick F. Kennedy asked Clinton's personal lawyer to once again affirm that all federal records in her possession have been provided to the agency.
The Associated Press reported Sept. 25 that the Obama administration recently discovered a chain of 2009 emails between Clinton and former Army Gen. David Petraeus that were not included among the 55,000 pages she had handed over. Their existence challenges the Democratic presidential front-runner's claim that she has already provided all of her work emails from her tenure as secretary, which are the subject of several public records lawsuits.
Clinton's lawyer, David Kendall, did not immediately respond Tuesday to a message left at his office.
Republicans have raised questions about thousands of emails that Clinton says she deleted on grounds that they were private in nature, as well as other undisclosed messages that have recently surfaced from the home-based server she used while at the State Department. Clinton has said publicly that she has turned over all the emails she is required to, but several congressional committees are investigating.
The emails Clinton has provided thus far begin 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, which she says she can no longer access.
The Petraeus emails, first discovered by the Defense Department and then passed to the State Department's inspector general, start on Jan. 10, 2009, with Clinton using the older email account. But by Jan. 28 - a week after her swearing in - they show she had switched to the private email address on her homebrew server.
Kennedy urged Kendall to contact "any Internet service and email providers" who might have copies of additional emails not yet provided by Clinton.
In a separate letter released Tuesday, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., raised the possibility that many of Clinton's emails, including some of those she withheld as private, may have been inadvertently kept by Datto, a Connecticut-based provider of email back-up devices and cloud storage.
Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wrote that Clinton purchased a Datto system in 2013 to provide on-site backup of her emails in case her home server failed. Though Clinton specifically instructed that copies of her emails not leave the devices under her control, Johnson's letter says his committee's investigation has determined that Datto's system may have automatically sent copies of Clinton's emails to cloud storage controlled by the company as recently as August 2015.
Republicans contend that Clinton's use of a private email server while secretary put sensitive government information at risk of being accessed by hackers or foreign intelligence services.
FBI Director James Comey confirmed last week that his agency is also looking into the security of Clinton's email setup.
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This story has been corrected to show the date The Associated Press reported the chain of emails between Clinton and Petraeus was Sept. 25, not Oct. 25.