
It is now clear that Hillary Clinton used a separate server — apart from the private one she used during the bulk of her tenure at the State Department — in the opening months of 2009 after her appointment as Secretary.
So where are the emails from that server?
Appearing on Meet The Press Sunday, Hillary Clinton dodged questions about when she started using the private server that has generated all the controversy, but her comments suggest that another separate server was used for business emails during her first few months as Secretary of State. None of the emails from that time period were produced to the State Department, but a chain of emails between Hillary and General Petraeus evidenced use of the server for more than two months earlier then she claimed.
This period, in the first months after taking office, is indeed critical. It was during this time that she set up the policy regarding clearing Bill’s speeches through an “ethics” officer at State. Access to these e mails is clearly important.
In materials prepared by her campaign, Clinton says that she began to use the main private server on March 18, 2009. That date coincides with the earliest emails released to date. The campaign also stated that “Before March 18, 2009,Secretary Clinton continued to use the email account she had used during her Senate service.”
But, after January 28, 2009, the email address used in the Emails to Petraeus used the [email protected], the address used at the State Dept.
The Petraeus emails began on January 10, 2009 and continued through February 28, 2009.
Published reports indicate that the home server was registered on January 13, 2009, to Clinton aide Justin Cooper but there are no records of any emails – other than the Petreus ones – until late March. According to CNN, an earlier server was registered in 2008 by another Clinton aide and was kept close to the Clinton home, but not necessarily in the home.
Under questioning from Chuck Todd, Clinton insisted that it was a simple matter to begin using the server in her basement. But Clinton also suggested that some emails were not on the server.
CLINTON: “It had been there for years. It is the system that my husband’s personal office used when he got out of the White House so it was sitting there in the basement. It was not any trouble at all. I know there are a lot of people who are questioning that, but the fact is that it was there. I added my account to it, it apparently took a little time to do that, so there was about a month where I didn’t have everything already on the server. We went back and tried to recover whatever we could recover.”
So, Hillary, what else was on that server?