Hillary Clinton meets with civil rights leaders at The National Urban League on Feb. 16, 2016 in New York City. | Getty State made earlier request for Clinton to hand over emails

The State Department in July 2014 unofficially requested that Hillary Clinton hand in copies of her work emails — much earlier than the late October 2014 date that has been cited by her presidential campaign and in court documents.

Conservative group Judicial Watch on Monday released a new email from Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, where Mills is following up on what appears to be a request from Secretary John Kerry’s chief of staff David Wade for hard copies of Clinton's messages.


“I wanted to follow up on your request last month about getting hard copies of Secretary Clinton's emails to/from accounts ending in ‘.gov’ for her tenure at the Department,” Mills wrote to David Wade on Aug. 22, 2014 under subject line “following up.”

“I will be able to get that to you, to the best of its availability. Given the volume, it will take some time to do but I wanted to let you know that I am working to get it to you," Mills continued.

The new batch of 189 documents, obtained through Judicial Watch’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, show that State gave Clinton an informal request several months before the Department's official request for documents. Both State and the campaign have acknowledged that conversations on the issue had been going on before the official request was sent, but it has been unclear how early.

It also means that Clinton’s lawyers actually took at least five months to give State about 30,000 official emails before deleting the rest of the 60,000 that she deemed to be personal matters.

State called the story old news.

“The fact that State Department officials were in contact with Secretary Clinton’s representatives in the summer of 2014 to discuss email records has been known and publicly confirmed by the Department for some time," said State Department Deputy Spokesperson Mark Toner "In the process of responding to congressional document requests pertaining to Benghazi, State Department officials recognized that it had access to relatively few email records from former Secretary Clinton. State Department officials contacted her representatives during the summer of 2014 to learn more about her email use and the status of emails in that account. We also recognized that we similarly did not have extensive email records from prior Secretaries of State and therefore included them when we requested their records in October 2014.”

The conservative group seized on the new email to suggest Clinton and State have “misled” the public about how long they had been corresponding about the email issue.

“The State Department and Mrs. Clinton have been misleading the American people, the Congress, and the courts about when the State Department asked her for the government emails she took with her when she left State,” said Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton. “The new emails show that Hillary Clinton was specifically and separately asked for her government emails months earlier than when the State Department has told the courts and when Clinton told the American people… Were the White House and John Kerry in on this deception?”

Separately, another conservative group suing State for documents, Cause of Action, revealed a new Mills email addressed to Clinton's former top IT staffer Bryan Pagliano at his 2008 campaign address, [email protected], rather than his State.gov account. The group is questioning whether Clinton aides turned over emails from such campaign accounts if they used them for official business as well.

“What other emails, potentially involving official government business, did [Huma] Abedin, Mills, Pagliano and perhaps other federal employees send/receive using Clinton’s 2008 campaign email account?" asked a Cause of Action spockesperson. "And have such emails been recovered and saved to official government record keeping systems? To date, we don’t know the answer to any of those questions.”

The group in a new letter asked Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) to investigate the matter to determine how many former Clinton campaign staffers used those campaign emails for work purposes and if they turned them over to the department.

They’re also questioning whether use of such emails constitutes a violation of the Hatch Act, which bars campaign activities from crossing into official duties.

“The use of campaign-funded email accounts for government business raises a host of potential compliance issues,” said Cause of Action Institute executive director Daniel Epstein in a statement for this story. “Taxpayers deserve to know how Washington uses their money, and vigilant oversight is necessary to determine why federal officials had access to and control over campaign email accounts and whether these records should be recovered.”

