Hillary Clinton gave no explicit indication of whether she agreed with Penn on some or all of his points, although she forwarded the message to one of her aides with her trademark “Pls print” notation. | Getty Clinton email reveal: Strategist suggested she run for Obama's VP in 2012

The first major batch of Hillary Clinton emails recovered by the FBI during its probe of her private email server went public Friday, including a message where one of her top political advisers floated the idea of her running for vice president in 2012.

“Only way for [President Barack Obama] to win second term is to ask you to be VP – he will realize that after midterms,” wrote Mark Penn, a pollster and chief strategist on her unsuccessful 2008 presidential bid.


The suggestion came as Penn offered a fairly critical review of Obama's 2010 State of the Union address.

“Thought it was overall pretty good speech – but he seemed angry as part of strategy to make him more passionate. Not good,” Penn wrote. “People are tired of words, they want deeds. He should stop all this tic-toc of his deliberations – they want action not handwringing.”

Clinton gave no explicit indication of whether she agreed with Penn on some or all of his points, although she forwarded the message to one of her aides with her trademark “Pls print” notation.

Penn's advice notwithstanding, Obama opted to stick with Vice President Joe Biden and managed to win re-election anyway.

Friday's release of previously unseen Clinton emails prompted another round of heartburn for Clinton's presidential campaign and anticipation on the part of Republican critics hoping for an October surprise.

However, the release proved to be something of a snoozer since many of the messages scheduled for release are already in the public domain in some form.

The emails released Friday did include some new messages, including one from President Bill Clinton about energy policy and one Hillary Clinton sent to daughter Chelsea Clinton about an initiative to promote start-up businesses and entrepreneurship in American cities.

State Department spokesman John Kirby said the messages were being released pursuant to a court order to disclose Clinton emails found by the FBI, but not turned over in the roughly 54,000 pages of messages she provided to State from her private account in 2014.

"This will be our first substantial release of information that we received from the FBI," Kirby said shortly before the messages were posted on State's website. "We'll be releasing approximately 75 documents totaling about 270 pages."

The FBI flagged State to about 5,600 messages investigators thought were potentially new, but lawyers representing State in a flurry of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits have said that about half of those messages are actually duplicates or near-duplicates, such as previously-released messages with the addition of Clinton's trademark request to her aides: "Pls print."

Where the FBI got the messages isn't entirely clear, but some appear to have come from computer equipment investigators obtained. Others may have come from the email accounts of third parties who traded messages with Clinton.

Most of the newly released messages carry metadata printed at the bottom indicating that they were once stored on a BlackBerry but were deleted on that device. Both Clinton and aide Huma Abedin had BlackBerrys on Clinton's private server.

A State Department spokeswoman declined to comment when asked about the notations, which were on the messages when provided to State by the FBI.

A Clinton campaign spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

Friday's document dump was the first of four court court-ordered disclosures of sets of the Clinton messages between now and Election Day.

One judge has ordered State to process 350 pages of Clinton's emails for release every other week through the election. Other judges have ordered an additional batch of 1,850 pages to be processed for release on Nov. 3, five days before the election.

The actual number of pages disclosed in each batch is likely to be substantially smaller than those figures would suggest because State can count toward the total entirely duplicative messages as well as those referred to other agencies for review.

"The order was to process — to work through 350 [pages,] which we did," Kirby said.

The pace of release is also substantially slower than when State was releasing emails Clinton provided directly to her former agency, with monthly releases of as many as 7,000 pages of messages.

State officials say they can't process the FBI-recovered Clinton emails at that rate because they are devoting resources to other Clinton-related requests with court-imposed deadlines before the election. But conservative groups and journalists contend State has allowed its FOIA-related staffing to slump, reducing its capacity in the months leading up to the election.

A few of the FBI-provided emails have already trickled out. Last month, State released two messages Clinton exchanged with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as three Benghazi-related messages. Portions of two of them had already been released.

Marco Acevedo contributed to this report.