Obama aides aware in '09 of Clinton's private email

In this Jan. 23, 2014, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
In this Jan. 23, 2014, then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the deadly September attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

WASHINGTON -- Senior officials in President Barack Obama's administration knew as early as 2009 that Hillary Rodham Clinton was using a private email address for her government correspondence, emails released Tuesday show.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel requested Clinton's email address on Sept. 5, 2009, according to one of some 3,000 pages of correspondence released Tuesday evening by the State Department. His request came three months after top Obama strategist David Axelrod corresponded with Clinton, now a Democratic presidential contender, at her private address.

But it's unclear whether the officials realized the secretary of state was running her email from a server in her Chappaqua, N.Y., home -- a potential security risk and violation of administration policy.

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

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 U.S. government. Those emails were censored because officials said they contained activities relating to the intelligence community or had discussed the production and dissemination of U.S. intelligence information.

At least two dozen emails also were marked "sensitive but unclassified" at the time they were written, including a December 2009 message from top Clinton aide Huma Abedin about an explosion in Baghdad that killed 90.

Though Clinton has said her home system included "numerous safeguards," it's unclear whether it used encryption software to communicate securely with government email services.

When nearly 900 pages of her emails were released in May, Clinton said the information in those messages -- also classified by the FBI before being released -- "was handled appropriately."

Still, the newly released 3,000 pages of Clinton's correspondence from 2009, her first year as the nation's top diplomat, leave little doubt that the Obama administration was aware that Clinton was using a personal address.

"The Secretary and Rahm are speaking, and she just asked him to email her -- can you send me her address please?" Amanda Anderson, Emanuel's assistant, wrote.

Abedin passed along the request to Clinton. "Rahm's assistant is asking for your email address. U want me to give him?"

Less than a minute later, Clinton replied that Abedin should send along the address.

Axelrod corresponded with Clinton in June 2009 to express his condolences about an elbow fracture she suffered after slipping on her way to a White House meeting and call her "an all-star player."

The White House counsel's office was not aware at the time Clinton was secretary of state that she relied solely on personal email and only found out as part of the congressional investigation into the 2012 Benghazi, Libya, attacks, a person familiar with the matter said.

Once the State Department turned over some of her messages in connection with the Benghazi investigation after she left office, making it apparent she had not followed government guidance, the White House counsel's office asked the department to ensure that her email records were properly archived, according to the person, who spoke on a condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak on the record.

The emails released Tuesday, 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 Tuesday.

Separately, the State Department on Tuesday provided more than 3,600 pages of documents to the Republican-led House committee investigating the Benghazi attacks, including emails of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations at the time, and former Clinton aides Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan.

The State Department is to publicly unveil 55,000 pages of her emails by Jan. 29 -- just three days before Iowa caucus-attendees will cast the first votes in the Democratic primary contest. Clinton has said she wants the department to release the emails as soon as possible.

Clinton turned her emails over to the State Department last year, nearly two years after leaving the Obama administration. She has said she got rid of about 30,000 emails she deemed exclusively personal.

The emails released Tuesday also show that Clinton and her staff fretted over her press coverage, celebrating favorable stories and trying to tone down others.

On May 1, 2009, Clinton's top communications aide, Philippe Reines, and Mills exchanged emails over concerns about how a New York Times piece on Clinton depicted her views of then-national security adviser Gen. James Jones.

Reines said Clinton was "understandably upset" with a section of the story that cited people "in her circle" saying "less-than-generous things" about Jones. He told Mills he was able to persuade the reporter to change the story.

Information for this article was contributed by Jack Gillum, Eileen Sullivan, Stephen Braun and Matthew Daly of The Associated Press and by Ben Brody and Jennifer Epstein of Bloomberg News.

A Section on 07/01/2015

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