Obama aides knew about Clinton's private email in 2009

Senior Obama administration officials knew as early as 2009 that Hillary Rodham Clinton was using a private email address for her government correspondence.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel requested Clinton's email address on Sept. 5, 2009, according to one of some 3,000 pages of correspondence released by the State Department on Tuesday evening. His request came three months after top Obama strategist David Axelrod asked the same question of one of Clinton's top aides.

But it's unclear whether the officials realized Clinton, now the leading Democratic presidential candidate, was running her email from a server located in her Chappaqua, New York, home — a potential security risk and violation of administration policy.

Clinton's emails have become an issue in her early 2016 campaign, as Republicans accuse her of using a private account rather than the standard government address to avoid public scrutiny of her correspondence. As the controversy has continued, Clinton has seen ratings of her character and trustworthiness drop in polling.

The newly released emails show Clinton sent or received at least 12 messages in 2009 on her private email server that were later classified "confidential" by the U.S. government because officials said they contained activities relating to the intelligence community.

Still, Clinton's correspondence from her first year as the nation's top diplomat leaves little doubt that the Obama administration was aware that Clinton was using a personal address.

"The Secretary and Rahm are speaking, and she just asked him to email her — can you send me her address please?" Amanda Anderson, Emanuel's assistant, wrote.

Abedin passed along the request to Clinton. "Rahm's assistant is asking for your email address. U want me to give him?"

Less than a minute later, Clinton replied that Abedin should send along the address.

In June, Axelrod requested her address, according to a message to Clinton from chief of staff Cheryl Mills.

The White House counsel's office was not aware at the time Clinton was secretary of state that she relied solely on personal email and only found out as part of the congressional investigation into the 2012 Benghazi, Libya, attacks, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Once the State Department turned over some of her messages in connection with the Benghazi investigation after she left office, making it apparent she had not followed government guidance, the White House counsel's office asked the department to ensure that her email records were properly archived, according to the person, who spoke on a condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak on the record.

The emails, covering March through December 2009, were posted online as part of a court mandate that the agency release batches of Clinton's private correspondence from her time as secretary of state every 30 days starting June 30.

The regular releases of Clinton's correspondence all but guarantee a slow drip of revelations from the emails throughout her primary campaign, complicating her efforts to put the issue to rest. The goal is for the department to publicly unveil 55,000 pages of her emails by Jan. 29, 2016 —- just three days before Iowa caucus-goers will cast the first votes in the Democratic primary contest. Clinton has said she wants the department to release the emails as soon as possible.

Clinton turned her emails over to the State Department last year, nearly two years after leaving the Obama administration.

The just-released emails from 2009 show informal adviser Sidney Blumenthal, whose ties to the Clinton family date back to former President Bill Clinton's White House years, actively trying to shape the early months of Hillary Clinton's time as America's top diplomat.

Republicans in Congress have sought to put a spotlight on his influence over Clinton on Libya as it descended into chaos in 2011.

The emails released by the State Department showed that the issues on which Blumenthal gave advice went far beyond Libya. He gave Clinton information on other sensitive issues as early as 2009.

He seemed to be a middleman between Clinton and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on the Northern Ireland peace process, according to an email he sent on June 14 that year.

Blumenthal was barred from a job at the State Department by aides to President Barack Obama  because of lingering distrust over his role advising Clinton's run against Obama in the acrimonious 2008 Democratic primary, according to The New York Times.

Wire services