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AP Photo Trump camp claims hacked email shows 'collusion' between Clinton campaign, Justice Department

Donald Trump's campaign is saying a hacked email reveals 'collusion' between Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Justice Department that tainted the criminal investigation into Clinton's private email set-up, even though the message predates that probe.

Trump adviser Jason Miller leveled the charge after an email posted by WikiLeaks showed Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon telling colleagues that someone at the Justice Department — where Fallon worked in a similar capacity just a couple months earlier —advised him of an imminent court hearing to discuss the schedule for the release of Clinton's emails in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

"DOJ folks inform me there is a status hearing in this case this morning, so we could have a window into the judge's thinking about this proposed production schedule as quickly as today," Fallon wrote to other high-level campaign aides on May 19, 2015.

However, the email came two months before the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the email arrangement and the handling of classified information found on Clinton's server. Notice of the hearing, involving a FOIA case brought a Vice News reporter, was on the federal court's public website and the session was open to the public.

"Today’s report that Clinton’s campaign was in communication with the Obama Department of Justice on the email investigation shows a level of collusion which calls into question the entire investigation into her private server," Trump communications adviser Jason Miller said in a statement. "The Department of Justice must release all communications with the Clinton campaign and her allies as soon as possible in order to definitively prove their investigation was completely above board.”

Fallon doesn't say in the email who at Justice shared the information about the hearing on the lawsuit, but the FOIA cases have been handed by lawyers from Justice's Civil Division, while the FBI investigation was overseen by Justice's National Security Division, a distinct unit. Officials there began probing Clinton's email arrangement in July 2015, after receiving a referral from the Intelligence Community Inspector General.

Asked Tuesday about the Trump camp's claim, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said he wouldn't address it specifically because it emerged from hacked emails.

"I'm not going to comment directly on the stolen emails of a private citizen," Earnest said.

However, the spokesman maintained his previous stance that there had been no interference in the probe.

"Both the attorney general and the FBI director have made clear that the investigation of Secretary Clinton's private email server was conducted without regard to partisan politics," Earnest said, adding that FBI Director James Comey stated that there was "not even an attempt by the White House to influence that investigation."

Federal government employees are generally prohibited from engaging in partisan political activity while at work, but one ethics expert said Tuesday that restriction does not bar all communications between officials and campaigns.

"Sounds like the type of communication I would routinely have with the [Republican National Committee] when I worked at the White House: giving them a status update," said Richard Painter, a former White House ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush.

Painter also said it would be appropriate for Justice Department lawyers to advise Clinton's aides or lawyers of what position the government was taking on FOIA requests for her emails.

"Mrs. Clinton's office is certainly entitled to know what the U.S. is going to do in these [FOIA] cases to the extent the government is willing to share that," said the former government ethics lawyer, now a law professor at the University of Minnesota. "I don’t think the fact that a former official is running for office changes that a lot. You do need to be somewhat careful that you are not engaged in advocacy or trying to coordinate with a political campaign a strategy for litigation or something like that."

Fallon's message to his colleagues took place just after the Justice Department submitted a court filing saying State wanted to hold off until January 2016 before releasing in one fell swoop the vast majority of the roughly 30,000 emails Clinton submitted to State in December 2014.

Some Clinton allies may have welcomed the idea of holding the emails back for months, but doing so would also have created fear that the long-delayed avalanche of messages might contain highly damaging revelations that could bury her campaign. Clinton's official stance was that she was "eager" to see the emails released quickly.

At the May 2015 hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras ruled that the messages would be released periodically. He ultimately ordered monthly releases running from June of that year through this past January.

A Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Trump campaign's charge.

Fallon had no comment in response to a query from POLITICO, but he did retweet a comment ridiculing an NBC News reporter's tweet calling attention to the email in question.

"This 'find' by NBC News is truly inane. Anybody can confirm a lousy status conference. Absolute garbage inference being peddled," criminal defense lawyer @bmaz wrote on Twitter.

Another former Obama administration Justice Department spokesman, Matthew Miller, also dismissed the report.

"Lame. A status hearing is publicly available information. Nothing confidential or secret here," Miller tweeted.

The FBI ultimately closed their investigation of Clinton's email arrangement without recommending any charges against her or anyone else. Messages the FBI recovered that were not in the batch Clinton turned over to State in 2014 are now in the process of being released by the State Department, but most are not likely to emerge until after the election.

The Fallon email was contained in a chain of messages released Tuesday by WikiLeaks after apparently being hacked from a Gmail account used by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta.