A U.S. intelligence agency was aware during the summer that a collection of Hillary Clinton's emails was available for sale, but never gave its agents permission to obtain them, DailyMail.com can reveal.

A well-placed official inside the agency told DailyMail.com about the U.S. government's interactions with an eastern European man who put them on the market, and said the U.S. could have obtained them.

That discussion was spurred by a dubious claim from the gossip website Radar Online that 32,000 messages from Hillary Clinton's now infamous private email account were for sale with an alleged asking price of $500,000.

'I'm not saying we could have gotten her entire email account. I'm not even saying for sure that what has been on the market is genuine,' the official cautioned.

'But opportunities were missed. That much is clear.'

WHAT EMAILS? The Obama administration could have procured an unspecified cache of Hillary Clinton's emails durign the summer but its agents found their hands were tied

'GUCCIFER': The notorious Romanian hacker Marcel Lazăr Lehel got a seven year prison term for, among other things, stealing emails from Hillary pal Sid Blumenthal's AOL account

The official said intelligence agencies spend money to buy secrets 'all the time,' and that the dollar amounts involved would likely have been 'small.'

It's unclear whether the collection that was reportedly for sale represented some of the more than 30,000 emails Clinton ordered deleted last year before she turned over the rest to the State Department.

It's also possible that the cache comprises a complete set of emails stolen from longtime Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal in 2013 by the notorious Romanian hacker Marcel Lazăr Lehel.

Lehel, a taxi driver better known as 'Guccifer,' hacked into Blumenthal's AOL account and later received a seven-year jail sentence in 2014 in his native country.

Included among the messages he pilfered was a series of conversations between Blumenthal and Clinton.

A National Security Council spokesperson declined comment about whether the Obama administration has ever soft-pedaled efforts to obtain hacked files that could shed light on Clinton’s email troubles.

But the new revelations point to the Obama administration's ambivalence in past months about aggressively pushing an investigation into accusations that the former secretary of state's digital lapses put national security at risk.

Clinton, now the Democratic Party's presidential front-runner, acknowledged in March that she kept her sensitive emails on a personal server that she controlled during the four years she was secretary of state.

Recent court-ordered releases of some of her emails have revealed nearly 200 that had to be scrubbed of classified material before they could be released publicly.

But Clinton has insisted that she never sent or received material from her unsecured personal email account that was 'marked classified' at the time.

The existence of her private email setup, which she reportedly maintained in her stately Chappaqua, New York home, was first indicated when details of the Blumenthal hack were leaked to the gossip website Gawker.

The intelligence official who spoke to DailyMail.com on Thursday said on condition of anonymity that the Obama adinistration believes 'Guccifer' gave a collection of his digital files related to Clinton and Blumenthal to a friend for safekeeping before he was arrested.

DEBUNKED: Radar Online's story claiming Hillary's entire email account was for sale leaned heavily on six email subject lines that were published two years ago

The hacker never revealed the full extent of his exploits. But his friend, the official said, began quietly trying to market some of the purloined files over the summer for an undisclosed sum.

Radar Online published on Thursday what it said were six email subject lines from Clinton's private account – including 'Libya security latest. Sid' and 'FYI, best analysis so far of hearing Sid' – as evidence that Clinton's entire email account was for sale.

All six of the subject lines, however, were already included in the 2013 public airing of Blumenthal's out-box.