Top officials ‘aware of Clinton’s private address’

But it is unclear if they knew her email was running from a server located in her home

Senior Obama administration officials, including the White House chief of staff, knew as early as 2009 that Hillary Rodham Clinton was using a private email address for her government correspondence, according to some 3,000 pages of correspondence released by the State Department late on Tuesday night.

The chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, requested Clinton’s email address on September 5, 2009, according to one email. His request came three months after top Obama strategist David Axelrod asked the same question of one of Clinton’s top aides.

But it’s unclear whether the officials realised Clinton, now the leading Democratic presidential candidate, was running her email from a server located in her home in Chappaqua, New York — a potential security risk and violation of administration policy.

The emails ranged from the mundane details of high-level public service — scheduling secure lines for calls, commenting on memos and dealing with travel logistics — to an email exchange with former President Jimmy Carter and a phone call with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Carter mildly chided Clinton about how to handle the release of two hostages held in North Korea, while Clinton recounted that Rice, her predecessor, “called to tell me I was on strong ground” regarding Israel.

One day in November 2009, aide Huma Abedin forwarded Clinton a list of 11, back-toback calls she was scheduled to make to foreign ministers around the world.

Character takes a beating

Clinton’s emails have become an issue in her early 2016 campaign, as Republicans accuse her of using a private account rather than the standard government address to avoid public scrutiny of her correspondence.

As the controversy has continued, Clinton has seen ratings of her character and trustworthiness drop in polling.

The emails, covering March through December 2009, were posted online as part of a court mandate that the agency release batches of Clinton’s private correspondence from her time as secretary of state every 30 days starting June 30.

The newly released emails show Clinton sent or received at least 12 messages in 2009 on her private email server that were later classified “confidential” by the US government because officials said they contained activities relating to the intelligence community.