FBI investigators recovered 30 emails from Hillary Clinton’s wiped server which discussed Benghazi, government lawyers said in federal court on Tuesday.
The disclosure was made during a hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in a case involving a lawsuit filed by the watchdog group Judicial Watch.
The Associated Press reports:
Government lawyers told U.S. District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta Tuesday that an undetermined number of the emails among the 30 were not included in the 55,000 pages previously provided by Clinton to State. The agency said it would need until the end of September to review the emails and redact potentially classified information before they are released.
Government lawyers revealed in a court filing last week that some of the emails recovered by FBI investigators from her email server contained “search terms” related to Benghazi.
Clinton gave the State Department more than 30,000 of her work-related emails in Dec. 2014. Of those, the State Department released 296 emails related to Benghazi and Libya. The agency asserted that those were all of the Clinton emails it had pertaining to Benghazi. But in September, the State Department discovered another 925 Benghazi-related emails. Those were handed over to the House Select Committee on Benghazi.
But it was revealed last month that Clinton deleted “several thousand” work-related emails from her server.
FBI director James Comey revealed that information during a July 5 press conference.
The State Department claimed last week that the disclosure that emails with Benghazi-related search terms had been found in the newly-recovered emails did not necessarily mean that Clinton deleted or otherwise withheld emails related to the topic. (RELATED: Judicial Watch: Hillary Clinton Withheld Or Deleted Benghazi-Related Documents)
“Using broad search terms, we have identified a number of documents potentially responsive to a Benghazi-related request. At this time, we have not confirmed that the documents are, in fact, responsive. We also have not determined if they involve Secretary Clinton,” a spokeswoman told TheDC in response to an article about the court filing.