Late last year, Hillary Clinton gave the State Department copies of her work email from her four-year tenure as secretary of state. The records begin on March 18, 2009 — a day aides had long identified as the point at which Clinton started using the personal email account she maintained on a home server in Chappaqua, N.Y.
Clinton actually began using the account, hdr22@clintonemail.com, about two months earlier than previously stated, in January 2009, an official with her campaign confirmed on Sunday. The clintonemail.com domain, the aide said, was not housed on the Clintons' Chappaqua server until March 2009 — at which point the server began storing Clinton's emails, starting with messages on March 18, 2009.
The federal records archived on the server — and provided by Clinton to the State Department late last year — begin on March 18, 2009, as a result, the official said.
(The campaign official did not identify the day in March that the hdr22@clintonemail.com account was transferred to the Chappaqua server. But the first email following the move, the official said, came on March 18, 2009.)
The early use of hdr22@clintonemail.com came to light on Friday, when the State Department announced it had been given copies of a previously undisclosed email chain showing that Clinton used the personal account as early as Jan. 28, 2009. The string of emails, an exchange between Clinton and David Petraeus, starts on Jan. 10, 2009, and ends on Feb. 1, 2009.
The Petraeus emails were not among those Clinton submitted to the State Department late last year. According to the campaign official, Clinton only has access to emails she sent or received after March 2009, when the hdr22@clintonemail.com account was moved to her home server.
The Petraeus emails, first reported by the Associated Press, conflict with the account given by the Clinton campaign this year about the sequence of events surrounding her email.
On Sunday, during an interview on Meet the Press, NBC News's Chuck Todd asked Clinton to address the discrepancy. "Well, everything that we had access to was certainly out there," Clinton told Todd. "And the reason we know about the email chain with General Petraeus is because it was on a government server."
When pressed to comment on the fact that she'd used hdr22@clintonemail.com earlier than previously stated, Clinton said, "There was a transition period."
The campaign official addressed the issue in more detail on Sunday, laying out a timeline of the hdr22@clintonemail.com setup during that "transition period": In January of 2009, the clintonemail.com domain was registered; shortly thereafter, Clinton began using hdr22@clintonemail.com; and by at least March 18, 2009, the account was moved to the server the Clintons kept at their house.
From January to March 18, 2009, as she moved to the State Department, Clinton also continued to email from the AT&T Blackberry account she used in her previous job as U.S. senator. (The old account was set up as a forwarding address, before being shut down altogether, a campaign spokesman said this summer.)
In the case of both the AT&T Blackberry and hdr22@clintonemail.com accounts, aides said, Clinton no longer has access to messages she sent or received as secretary of state from January to March 18, 2009.