New records released by the State Department confirm that the agency asked Hillary Clinton for her work-related emails much earlier than the Democratic presidential candidate has claimed in public.
The watchdog group Judicial Watch on Tuesday published emails it received through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit which show that Clinton’s State Department chief of staff, Cheryl Mills, sent a message in 2014 to Sec. of State John Kerry’s chief of staff indicating that the agency had inquired about emails from Clinton’s personal email account in July of that year.
That’s three months earlier than the date Clinton regularly claims her emails were officially requested.
In an effort to portray her email practices as normal — as opposed to unorthodox and unprecedented — Clinton has asserted numerous times that she handed over her 55,000 pages of work-related emails in response to an Oct. 28, 2014 request sent by the State Department to her and other former secretaries of state.
Clinton left the State Department in Feb. 2013 but did not hand over the records until Dec. 5, 2014.
“I wanted to follow up on your request last month about getting hard copies of Secretary Clinton’s emails to/from accounts ending in ‘.gov’ for her tenure at the Department,” Mills wrote in an Aug. 22, 2014 email to David Wade, Kerry’s chief of staff.
“I will be able to get that to you, to the best of its availability. Given the volume, it will take some time to do but I wanted to let you know that I am working to get it to you,” she added.
That email undermines what Clinton has said about the timeline of the State Department’s request for her records.
“The State Department formally requested the assistance of the four previous former Secretaries in a letter to their representatives dated October 28, 2014, to help in further meeting the Department’s requirements under the Federal Records Act,” her campaign website reads.
The website also asserts that the State Department issued its request “after recognizing potential gaps in its overall recordkeeping system.”
The Washington Post reported in September that the State Department had acknowledged that Clinton’s timeline of events was inaccurate. However, the paper’s report did not provide details about the request. Nor did it report which month the State Department contacted Clinton and Company.