WASHINGTON — The State Department says it can find only four emails sent between former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and her staff concerning drone strikes and certain U.S. surveillance programs, and those notes have little to do with either subject.
WASHINGTON — The State Department says it can find only four emails sent between former Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and her staff concerning drone strikes and certain U.S. surveillance programs, and those notes have little to do with either subject.
She asks for a phone call in one, a phone number in another. She seeks advice on how best to condemn information leaks, and accidentally replies to one work email with questions apparently about decorations.
The messages also reveal Clinton used an iPad to email while secretary of state in addition to her BlackBerry, despite her explanation she set up a private email account and homebrew server while she was the nation’s top diplomat so that she could carry a single device.
The four emails were obtained by The Associated Press under a 2013 Freedom of Information Act request and offer one of the first looks into Clinton’s correspondence at the State Department. It is the first time it has provided Clinton-related documents in response to several outstanding FOIA requests, the first of which AP filed in 2010.
The response also came about three weeks after AP filed a federal lawsuit against the State Department, seeking to force the release of materials during Clinton’s tenure.
Clinton is widely expected to announce her candidacy for president next month, and will enter the race as the favorite to win the Democratic nomination.
The 2013 request sought correspondence between Clinton and her advisers over a four-year period that contained keywords such as “drone,” ”metadata” and “prism.” The latter was among several code words for controversial U.S. surveillance programs revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
Although Clinton left office four months before the Snowden leaks were first published in June 2013, the AP’s request sought messages about those programs before they were publicly disclosed.
