WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has discovered a chain of e-mails that Hillary Rodham Clinton failed to turn over when she provided what she said was the full record of work-related correspondence as secretary of state, officials said Friday, adding to the growing questions related to the Democratic presidential front-runner’s unusual usage of a private e-mail 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 the 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 has handed over the entirety of her work e-mails from the account.
Republicans have raised questions about thousands of e-mails that she has deleted on grounds that they were private in nature, as well as other messages that have surfaced independently of Clinton and the State Department.
The State Department’s record of Clinton e-mails begins on March 18, 2009, — almost two months after she entered office. Before then, Clinton has said she used an old AT&T Blackberry e-mail account, the contents of which she no longer can access.
The Petraeus e-mails, first discovered by the Defense Department and then passed to the State Department’s inspector general, challenge that claim. They start on Jan. 10, 2009, with Clinton using the older e-mail account. But by Jan. 28 — a week after her swearing in — she switched to using the private e-mail address on a homebrew server that she would rely on for the rest of her tenure. There are less than 10 e-mails back and forth in total, officials said, and the chain ends on Feb. 1.
