The nation's top diplomats came up with a total of four emails when the Associated Press used a Freedom of Information Act request to compel the State Department to produce messages former Secretary Hillary Clinton sent and received concerning drone strikes and U.S. surveillance programs, the news service reported.

"And those notes have little to do with either subject," the AP judged. Clinton "asks for a phone call in one, a phone number in another. She (also) seeks advice on how best to condemn information leaks, and accidentally replies to one work email with questions apparently about decorations," the agency detailed.

The 2013 request mentioned keywords such as "drone," "metadata" and "prism" and asked for correspondence between Clinton and her advisers over a four-year period. The AP only obtained a response after it filed a federal lawsuit against the State Department about three weeks ago that sought to compel the release of materials during her tenure, it said.

The low number of messages might be due to State Department slang, said Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert at the Federation of American Scientists. Its diplomats may, for example, use the term "UAV" -- or unmanned aerial vehicle -- instead of "drone," he noted. But it is also possible that Clinton and her advisers' emails are not in the department's archives, Aftergood added.

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

Clinton, the presumed Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 White House race, was harshly criticized in recent weeks after she revealed that she had used her private email account to conduct government business during her four-year tenure as secretary of State.

House Republican leaders are now weighing whether to try to force her to hand over her personal email server, Politico noted. Computer forensics experts told the Washington publication that some of her correspondence could probably be recovered even though the former secretary deleted her messages.

Clinton's attorney, David Kendall, however, on Friday told a congressional panel that the request would be pointless because IT staff had determined that the messages were gone for good, Politico said.