FBI investigators have reportedly recovered work-related and personal emails from Hillary Clinton’s time as secretary of state that she claimed had been deleted from a private computer server.
Clinton the frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has been dogged by questions about her use of a private email account for government business.
She has said that she sent and received about 60,000 emails during her four years in the Obama administration, about half of which were deleted after her aides determined which were personal and which were work related. The others were turned over to the State Department.
The FBI has been investigating the security of Clinton's email setup, which she said she used as a matter of convenience. She has since acknowledged that her use of the so-called "homebrew" private email server to conduct government business was a mistake and apologized.
However she has asserted that she had the right under government rules to decide which emails were private and delete them, a claim backed up by the Justice Department earlier this month.
But officials told Bloomberg that the FBI had managed to salvage some of the emails deleted by her staff, raising the prospect that Clinton’s correspondence could eventually become public. The report was corroborated by The New York Times, citing two unnamed officials.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, one official told the Times it had not been very hard for the FBI to recover the messages.
Once the e-mails have been extracted, a group of agents has been separating personal correspondence and passing along work-related messages to agents leading the investigation, another official told Bloomberg.
A Clinton spokesman, Nick Merrill told the financial news wire that her team had “cooperated to date and will continue to do so, including answering any questions about this that anyone including the public may have.”