State Department asks Hillary Clinton to look again for old emails
Hillary Clinton says she has given the State Department all of the still-accessible emails pertaining to her tenure as secretary of state. The State Department, however, doesn't seem so sure about that.
The department has sent a letter to Clinton's lawyer David Kendall, asking Clinton to search for and hand over any relevant emails that she has yet to give them, CBS News confirms. The letter was filed in federal court Tuesday morning.
So far, Clinton has handed over 55,000 pages of documents from March 18, 2009 through February 1, 2013. The State Department is reviewing the emails and incrementally releasing them to the public, to comply with multiple Freedom of Information Act requests.
While Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in January 2009, she has said that prior to March 18, she used the email account that she used during her Senate service -- an email account she can no longer access. It was only after March 18, Clinton has said, that she started using a private email address and private server in her capacity as secretary of state.
However, the Obama administration has discovered an email chain between Clinton and retired Gen. David Petraeus that shows Clinton was using her private email account to conduct business by January 28, 2009.
None of the Clinton emails that have surfaced so far from that period -- from January through March 2009 -- have been found to contain classified information, but they raise questions about what other communications may not have been disclosed yet. The letter filed Tuesday asks Clinton to contact her email provider to see if they can possibly get emails from that time period.
In addition to responding to Freedom of Information Act requests, the State Department is complying with an FBI inquiry into whether classified information was mishandled on Clinton's server.
Meanwhile, more emails from Clinton's personal account may be recovered from a company that was apparently hired to back up the emails on a cloud storage site, McClatchy reports. In addition to hiring the firm Platte River to maintain her server and her private email account, Clinton or her aides arranged for the company Datto to back up her data, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, reportedly disclosed this week.
CBS News' Paula Reid contributed to this report