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Some emails between Chelsea Clinton and her mother, Hillary Clinton, have already emerged. Citizens United sues for Chelsea Clinton emails

The conservative group Citizens United filed a lawsuit Thursday demanding access to emails Chelsea Clinton exchanged with five top aides to her mother, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, while she served as secretary of state.

The Freedom of Information Act suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, also seeks emails in State Department files from three other key figures in the Clinton orbit: Clinton Foundation foreign policy chief Amitabh Desai, longtime aide to President Bill Clinton Justin Cooper, and the manager of the Clintons' Chappaqua, New York, home, Oscar Flores.

Citizens United President David Bossie said in an interview that the group wants Chelsea Clinton's emails as part of its investigation into links between the Clinton Foundation and activities of the State Department during Hillary Clinton's tenure as secretary.

"The real interesting person here is, of course, Chelsea Clinton, who is the lead person. … We saw that pop up on the grid in all email we received over the past year," Bossie said, referring to other FOIA requests and suits brought by his group. "We want to see much more about what Chelsea Clinton was up to because she now has put herself out here on the campaign trail, along with Bill Clinton, as a lead surrogate."

The new suit could reignite a debate about how much scrutiny Chelsea Clinton should be exposed to by the media and her mother's political opponents. During her father's presidency, Chelsea was a teenager and was rarely reported on by the mainstream media. Similar low-profile treatment of her continued through her mother's first presidential bid in 2007 and 2008, although the first daughter was by that time in her late 20s. Now, she's a 35-year-old mother of one as her mother mounts a second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and the White House.

Asked whether Chelsea Clinton should be off-limits in the current political debate, Bossie said emphatically: "Absolutely not."

Chelsea "is somebody who has been a player, a senior adviser to her mother. … She is an officer, somebody with fiduciary responsibility at the Clinton Family Foundation."

A spokesman for Hillary Clinton's presidential bid had no immediate comment on the suit.

Some emails between Chelsea and her mother have already emerged during the release of tens of thousands of messages Hillary Clinton kept on a private server as secretary. One exchange featured prominently at a House hearing in October where Hillary Clinton testified about the lead-up and response to the deadly attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya. In those messages, Clinton told her daughter (who used the pseudonym "Diane Reynolds" when emailing State) that the attacks were carried out by "an Al Queda-like [sic] group." Committee Republicans said that statement was at odds with what Clinton and other administration officials were saying publicly at the time, namely that the assault was the product of spontaneous anger and protest over an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube.

At the hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) did not refer to Chelsea Clinton by name, instead simply calling her a "family member."

Bossie said his group is seeking the records for use in a documentary about Clinton that is a sequel to the group's 2008 film, "Hillary: The Movie." The organization's efforts to air that film on TV or cable in advance of Democratic presidential primaries that year led to the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling overturning a longtime ban on corporations and unions making so-called independent expenditures in federal political campaigns.

The new lawsuit seeks emails that Chelsea Clinton, Desai, Cooper and Flores traded with Hillary Clinton's chief of staff Cheryl Mills, deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin, Director of Policy Planning Jake Sullivan, Special Representative for Global Partnerships Kris Balderston and Michael Fuchs, who served at the time on State's policy planning staff and is now a deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs.

A federal judge has already ordered the processing of all the emails Abedin handed over to the State Department from a private account last year. Those are due for monthly release beginning by March and concluding by April 2017. However, it's possible that a judge could order requests for a subset of those records to be fulfilled before the process of releasing the larger trove is complete.

UPDATE (Thursday, 2:20 P.M.): This post has been updated to clarify Fuchs' positions at State.

