Recently released emails from Hillary Clinton's time during her first year as US Secretary of State contain several messages on Sri Lanka which were sent during the last months of the armed conflict.
An email sent on May 4, 2009 seemed to suggest that the International Monetary Fund was unhappy with Ms Clinton "ordering/telling" the IMF to suspend the funding of the government of Sri Lanka.
Burns Strider, a political consultant and former senior advisor to the then-secretary of state, said he felt "people on the ground", from both the World Bank and the IMF, believed that the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam needed to be "completely defeated" and that "collateral damage inflicted on private people" by the actions of the Sri Lankan government were "ok", in their eyes.
The IMF is said to have asked for and held a meeting with Timothy Geithner, who was US Secretary of the Treasury at the time, where they told him Ms Clinton was "intruding into his domain".
Mr Strider goes on to say the IMF and the World Bank hoped to get Mr Geithner to "intervene" on this issue.
Ms Clinton forwarded the email to her Chief of Staff and Deputy Chief of Staff at the time, Cheryl Mills and Jake Sullivan, asking for further information. Mr Sullivan's response says that Mr Strider's email "is not consistent" with what he knows, and goes to outline his own take, which was redacted by the State Department.
In another email, sent to Mr Sullivan on the morning of May 17, Ms Clinton said,
"It sounds as tho the war may be over. I want to move on a few fronts that I'd like to discuss."
A Sri Lanka update sent by a foreign service officer named Rana Gautam on May 16 is completely redacted, to which Ms Clinton responded, asking to be kept updated.
The State Department earlier this week released around 3,000 of Hillary Clinton's emails from 2009, in response to a FOIA lawsuit filed against State by VICE News last January. Large sections of information are redacted, often citing a privacy exemption and an exemption that protects the so-called "deliberative process." The emails also contained redactions in which the State Department withheld information citing a national security exemption.
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