State Department officials in charge of public records were not aware Hillary Clinton was using ­e-mail during her tenure there until they saw a viral image of the then-secretary of state looking at her BlackBerry on a satirical blog called “Texts from Hillary.”

Speaking under oath in a lawsuit brought against the department by a conservative legal watchdog, a State Department official said the office in charge of processing open-records requests at the agency had no idea Clinton was using e-mail.

So when “Texts from Hillary” made the Clinton image ubiquitous in 2012, the department decided to check whether she still had no official account.

“When Mrs. Clinton’s photo appeared in the media with her using — appearing to use — some sort of a mobile device, Clarence Finney checked with [the IT office] to confirm whether the answer was still that she did not have a state.gov e-mail account,” department official Karin Lang said in testimony posted online by Judicial Watch.

Finney was in charge of the office responsible for processing Freedom of Information Act requests pertaining to Clinton, according to The Hill newspaper, which reports on Congress. Such requests often include official ­e-mail sent by government workers.

Clinton, as it turned out, did not have a government e-mail. Instead, she was sending sensitive info through a private e-mail address that was housed on a home-brew server stashed in the basement of her Chappaqua home.

Judicial Watch’s suit seeks records about the employment status of Clinton’s longtime aide and confidante Huma Abedin.

The photo of Clinton staring at her BlackBerry while wearing sunglasses was taken in 2011 on a military plane bound for Tripoli.

It inspired a “Text from Hillary” meme and the blog in which the image was captioned with various funny text messages.

Even Clinton used the image, adopting it as her profile picture when she opened her own Twitter account in 2013.

Meanwhile, it was revealed Thursday that a series of e-mails relating to drone strikes in Pakistan are at the center of the criminal probe into Clinton’s handling of classified information.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the correspondence in 2011 and 2012 was between US diplomats in Islamabad and their superiors in Washington. At issue was whether to oppose specific drone strikes in Pakistan.

The e-mails, which did not mention the “CIA,” “drones” or details about militant targets, were written within the often-narrow time frame State officials were given to decide whether to object to drone strikes before the CIA pulled the trigger.

Some of the e-mails were forwarded by Clinton’s aides to her personal e-mail account, the Journal reported.

The White House referred to the probe of Clinton’s e-mails as a possible “criminal investigation” for the first time Thursday as Press Secretary Josh Earnest rebuffed questions on whether President Obama’s endorsement of Clinton might be seen as unduly influencing the Justice Department’s probe.

With Reuters