Administration knew of private Clinton email
Documented request by official made in 2009
WASHINGTON — 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 about 3,000 pages of correspondence released by the State Department late Tuesday.
The chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, requested Clinton’s email address Sept. 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 realized Clinton, now the leading Democratic presidential candidate, was running her email from a server in her home in Chappaqua, New York— a potential security risk and violation of administration policy.
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 regular releases of Clinton’s correspondence all but guarantee a slow drip of revelations from the emails throughout her primary campaign, complicating her efforts to put the issue to rest. The goal is for the department to publicly unveil 55,000 pages of her emails by Jan. 29, 2016 — just three days before Iowa caucus-goers will cast the first votes in the Democratic primary contest. Clinton has said she wants the emails released as soon as possible.
A Republican-led House panel investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, also is examining emails of Clinton and other former department officials, raising the possibility of further revelations into 2016. The State Department provided more than 3,600 pages of documents to the committee on Tuesday, including emails.
Pushing back, the Clinton campaign released a video on Wednesday that argues that seven previous investigations have debunked the conspiracy theories surrounding the attacks that killed four Americans.