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State Department releases 4 Clinton e-mails on drones

Action follows media requests and lawsuit

WASHINGTON — The State Department says it can find only four e-mails sent between former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton and her staff concerning drone strikes and certain US surveillance programs, and those notes have little to do with either subject.

She asks for a phone call in one, a phone number in another. She seeks advice on how best to condemn information leaks, and accidentally replies to one work e-mail with questions apparently about decorations.

The messages also reveal Clinton used an iPad to e-mail while secretary of state in addition to her BlackBerry, despite her explanation she set up a private e-mail account and home server while she was the nation’s top diplomat so that she could carry a single device.

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The four e-mails were obtained by the Associated Press under a 2013 Freedom of Information Act request and offer one of the first looks into Clinton’s correspondence at the State Department. It is the first time the department has provided Clinton-related documents in response to several outstanding FOIA requests, the first of which AP filed in 2010.

The response also came about three weeks after AP filed a federal lawsuit against the State Department, seeking to force the release of materials during Clinton’s tenure.

Clinton is expected to announce her candidacy for president next month, and will enter the race as the favorite to win the Democratic nomination.

The 2013 request sought correspondence between Clinton and her advisers over a four-year period that contained keywords such as ‘‘drone,’’ “metadata’’ and ‘‘prism.’’ The latter was among several code words for US surveillance programs revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Although Clinton left office four months before the Snowden leaks were published in June 2013, the AP’s request sought messages about those programs before they were publicly disclosed. The request also asked for certain e-mails about government programs to eavesdrop on terror suspects believed to be foreigners.

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Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, said the low number of e-mails could be because the State Department uses different words to describe its operations — such as ‘‘UAV,’’ or unmanned aerial vehicle, instead of ‘‘drone.’’ It’s also possible that Clinton and her advisers’ e-mails are not in the department’s archives, he said.

‘‘If there are four, one would expect there to be quite a few more than that,’’ Aftergood said. ‘‘And it looks like another indication of faulty records management and retrieval at the State Department.’’

Clinton has said she exchanged about 60,000 e-mails while secretary of state, about half of them work-related. She said none contained classified information, and that her private e-mail system did not suffer any security breaches.

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own e-mail server gave Clinton complete control over access to her message archives. She deleted e-mails — some 30,000 in total — she described as personal in nature, and has declined the request of Republicans that she turn over her server for an independent review.