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Bryan Pagliano walks through the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center after leaving a House Benghazi Committee interview on Sept. 10, 2015. | Getty State Department claims it can't find any Clinton texts or email file for IT aide

The State Department maintains that it cannot find any text messages sent to or from former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and cannot locate any emails received or sent by a key information technology staffer during her tenure, lawyers for the Republican Party said in a court filing Monday.

However, a State spokeswoman said Monday the agency has located some emails belonging to the computer specialist, Bryan Pagliano, although the messages were found in other people's accounts.

In a submission in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Republican National Committee, attorneys representing the GOP said State had advised that its searches for Clinton texts, BlackBerry instant messages and emails belonging to Pagliano all came up empty for a period of May 2009 through February 2013.

Pagliano did computer work at State and also was reportedly on Clinton's own payroll to maintain the private server where her email messages were stored.

Last year, he took the Fifth Amendment when called before the House Benghazi Committee. Pagliano was later reported to have struck an immunity deal with the Justice Department to provide information to FBI agents investigating Clinton's server and how more than 2000 messages the State Department now says are classified wound up on that system.

The RNC filed the FOIA suit at issue in March, seeking the Clinton's text or BBMs messages as well as all messages sent or received by former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, former State Department policy planning director Jake Sullivan and current Undersecretary of State Patrick Kennedy.

State has said producing all the emails of those staffers during the nearly four-year period at issue would be too burdensome. GOP officials have "proposed methods through which the requests can be narrowed and prioritized," the filing Monday said.

State said publicly last December that it could not locate the main archive of Pagliano's messages from the Clinton era. Department officials told the Senate Judiciary Committee that one reason the IT staffer's emails might be unavailable was that the FBI had taken his computer in the course of its investigation.

State aides also said official emails were not routinely archived during Clinton's tenure, the agency has managed to find large volumes of messages belonging to various aides, although apparently not Pagliano.

State spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau said Monday that the agency "disagrees with a number of assertions made in today’s filing, and will be responding in court."

"The Department has searched for Mr. Pagliano’s email pst file and has not located one that covers the time period of Secretary Clinton’s tenure. To be clear, the Department does have records related to Mr. Pagliano and we are working with Congress and FOIA requesters to provide relevant material," Trudeau said in a statement. "The Department has located a pst from Mr. Pagliano’s recent work at the Department as a contractor, but the files are from after Secretary Clinton left the Department. We are continuing to search for Mr. Pagliano’s emails which the Department may have otherwise retained."