Hillary Clinton Explains Discrepancy in When She Began Using Private Email Server
— -- Hillary Clinton said today that newly released emails dated before she had said her private server was operational were from a "transition period."
There "was about a month" when all of her emails weren't on the server that was later turned over to the State Department because her account needed to be added, she said in an interview on NBC "Meet the Press."
“There was about a month where I didn't have everything already on the server, and we went back, tried to recover whatever we could recover," she said. "I think it's also fair to say that there are some things about this that I just can't control. I can't control the technical aspects of it.
"There was a transition period," she continued. "I wasn't that focused on my email account to be clear here."
The Democratic presidential candidate also said that she been as transparent as possible in releasing her emails.
Newly disclosed emails from Clinton to then-CENTCOM chief David Petraeus show the former secretary of state was using a private server earlier than she had previously said.
The new set of emails, from January to February 2009, was turned over to the State Department by the Department of Defense, said State Department spokesman John Kirby. The story was first reported by The Associated Press.
The State Department said its record of Clinton emails begins on March 18, 2009. Over the nearly two months she was in office before that, Clinton has said she used a Blackberry email account that she can no longer access.
The discovery appears to contradict Clinton's sworn statement that she had turned over all the email from her private server to the State Department.
“I’m not by any means a technical expert,” Clinton said today. “I relied on the people who were and we have done everything we could in response to the State Department asking us to do this review because they asked all the former secretaries.”
It is unclear where Clinton’s email was hosted during the transition period she referenced.
The revelation about the earlier emails came the same day the State Department said it had found previously undisclosed emails related to the Benghazi terror attack on Clinton's private email account.
In February, the Department turned over 296 emails relating to Benghazi to the House Select Committee investigation the attack, claiming at the time they were the only emails relevant to the committee's request.
The discovery Friday of a handful of new emails, first reported by the Daily Beast, contradicted that claim.
A senior State Department official told ABC News on Friday that it missed these emails the first time around because of the cumbersome nature of discovery process. Clinton turned over 55,000 printed pages of documents that had to be search by hand, which prevented researchers from conducting electronic keyword searches, according to this official. The new emails were discovered only after the documents had been scanned and searched on a computer.
Clinton today also brushed off the theory that she used a private email server to make her records inaccessible to FOIA requests and referred to it as “another conspiracy theory."
"It's totally ridiculous,” she said. "That never crossed my mind."
ABC News' Justin Fishel and Dean Schabner contributed to this story.
