In a sworn statement on August 10, Hillary Clinton declared “under penalty of perjury” that she had turned over all work-related e-mails in her possession to the State Department. On Friday, Obama administration officials directly disputed that sworn assertion.

Unnamed White House staffers told the Associated Press that they’ve found a chain of official e-mails that the former secretary of state did not return to the State Department before August 10. The e-mails are said to contain a correspondence between Clinton and General David Petraeus, who headed the U.S. Army’s Central Command at the time. The chain began before Clinton took office in early 2009, but continued after she became secretary of state. Officials say they largely involve personnel concerns, and are unlikely to contain classified material.

Though the FBI is currently combing through deleted e-mails recovered from Clinton’s private server, it’s not clear whether they or another agency first discovered the correspondence with Petraeus. The previously undisclosed e-mail chain raises questions about whether Clinton withheld other official e-mails from the State Department and congressional investigators, and may open the Democratic front-runner to perjury charges. If such charges were filed, however, Clinton could have a significant legal defense: As some observers noted at the time she signed the statement, she only swore to have directed all her e-mails be turned over — not actually to have certified that it was done.

#share#News of the Petraeus messages broke just minutes after the State Department said it had accidentally withheld “a small number” of Benghazi-related Clinton e-mails from the House Select Committee on Benghazi, and turned over 925 such e-mails to the Committee. The Daily Beast reported that in addition to the handful of new Benghazi e-mails, a vast number of new e-mails involving Libya and a few Benghazi e-mails previously labeled “personal” were also released.

The Benghazi Committee reacted cautiously to the new production. “If indeed this is a sign the stonewalling and political protection effort that was previously being run by the Department is diminishing, the Committee welcomes it,” Committee spokesman Jamal Ware said in a statement. “The proof will be in the production.”

— Brendan Bordelon is a political reporter for National Review.