Hillary Clinton's emails are back in the headlines after a federal appeals court revived a pair of lawsuits on Tuesday that could force the federal government to sue Clinton with the hopes of recovering more emails from her private server.



A three-judge panel of the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals agreed on the ruling on Tuesday, according to Politico.



The court reversed a lower court ruling that had originally thrown out the email suits, claiming they were “moot.”



The initial ruling came after Clinton had released about 55,000 emails to the State Department, Reuters noted. She held on to about 30,000 emails, though, saying they were personal and not related to her work.



On Tuesday, the court said the State Department and the federal archives should have done more to recover Clinton’s emails.



One of the judges, Stephen Williams, said the agencies failed to ask the attorney general for help in the probe and didn’t exercise other ways to uncover new emails.



“The Department has not explained why shaking the tree harder – e.g., by following the statutory mandate to seek action by the Attorney General – might not bear more still,” Williams wrote, per Reuters. “Absent a showing that the requested enforcement action could not shake loss a few more emails, the case is not moot.”



“While the case might well…be moot if a referral were pointless (e.g., because no imaginable enforcement action by the Attorney General could lead to recovery of the missing emails), the record here provides no factual support for finding mootness on that basis,” Williams wrote, per Politico.



Clinton attorney David Kendall did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.



Clinton and her attorneys have already said she will not be releasing anymore emails to U.S. officials, no matter if she’s sued or not, Politico noted.



According to Williams, Clinton had two nongovernmental email accounts while she was secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, International Business Times noted.



She also used an account on her Blackberry, which she had while serving as a senator.



Clinton began using the email account on her private server as early as March 2009.



“Because the complaints sought recovery of emails from all of the former Secretary’s accounts, the FBI’s recovery of a server that hosted only one account does not moot the suits,” Williams wrote.



