Blog Briefing Room

Effort to recover missing Clinton emails fails

An attorney for Hillary Clinton says it’s not possible to recover emails missing from the former secretary of State’s personal server, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Emails from Clinton’s first two months on the job were missing from the batch of 30,000 emails turned over last year.

David Kendall, an attorney for Clinton, said in a letter to the State Department this month that the lost emails proved irretrievable due to technical errors in the server when it was first created.

{mosads}“She does not have custody of emails sent or received in the first few weeks of her tenure, as she was in transition to a new address, and we have been unable to obtain these,” Kendall wrote, according to the Journal.

“In the event we do, we will immediately provide the Department with federal record-emails in this collection.”

Clinton’s representatives have said she did not set up the private email server until March 2009.

She took office as secretary of State in January of that year, using an AT&T BlackBerry and a personal domain email account run off an unknown server for the first eight weeks of her tenure.

Clinton testified before the House Select Committee on Benghazi on Thursday during a marathon 11- hour session, where Republicans pressed her on the use of a private email server. The 2016 presidential contender emerged largely unscathed from the hearing.

Republicans have defended their questions about Clinton’s private email, saying it could have endangered national security and is essential to understanding the administration’s response to the Benghazi attack. But Democrats have scolded the committee as a political effort to hurt Clinton’s campaign and say the inquiry has little to do with addressing the 2012 attack that killed four Americans.