A federal grand jury provided FBI agents with subpoenas to inspect Hillary Clinton’s BlackBerry devices last year, court papers provided to Judicial Watch show.

According to the watchdog group, FBI counterintelligence official E.W. Priestap filed a sworn declaration stating that the FBI “obtained Grand Jury subpoenas related to the Blackberry e-mail accounts.”

The subpoenas “produced no responsive materials, as the requested data was outside the retention time utilized by those providers,” stated Priestap, who supervised the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s potential mishandling of classified information as secretary of state.

Clinton used a private email server hooked up to her personal BlackBerries to send and receive business emails. Thousands of the messages contained classified information.

Priestap’s declaration is the first official acknowledgement that a grand jury was used in the Clinton email investigation. But the declaration raises new questions because of various reports stating that a grand jury never was convened as part of the probe.

It is unclear what other actions the grand jury took in the email investigation.

FBI Director James Comey ultimately announced on July 5 that he would not be recommending charges against Clinton for mishandling classified information.

Tom Fitton, Judicial Watch’s president, questions why the information about the grand jury is just now being disclosed to his group, which has filed numerous lawsuits against the State Department and other agencies for records about Clinton’s emails.

“The FBI convened a grand jury to investigate Hillary Clinton in 2016. Why is this information being released only now?” Fitton asked in a statement. “And it is disturbing that the State Department, Justice Department and FBI are still trying to protect Hillary Clinton. President Trump needs to clean house at all these agencies.”

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