NSA has Clinton's deleted emails, whistleblower claims

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Clinton doubles down on defense of classified emails

Legal and political fallout examined on 'America's Newsroom'

The National Security Agency has Hillary Clinton’s deleted emails, and the FBI could access them if it wanted to, a former NSA official claimed in a radio interview.

William Binney, an architect of the NSA’s surveillance program who became a whistleblower when he resigned from the agency in 2001, made the claim on Aaron Klein’s Investigative Radio Sunday. Klein also reported on Binney’s comments for Breitbart.com.

Binney pointed to 2011 testimony by then-FBI Director Robert Mueller before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which Mueller said the agency has access to "sophisticated, searchable databases" to track down terrorists.

According to Binney, Mueller testified that "he got together with the Department of Defense, and they created a technology database where he ... could go in with one query and get all past emails and all future emails as they came in on a person."

“Now what [Mueller] is talking about is going into the NSA database, which is shown of course in the [Edward] Snowden material released, which shows a direct access into the NSA database by the FBI and the CIA,” Binney said.

“So that means that NSA and a number of agencies in the U.S. government also have those [Clinton] emails,” he said. “So if the FBI really wanted them they can go into that database and get them right now.”

It is unclear whether the database Mueller referred to would in fact contain the emails of top administration officials, like Clinton, or just suspects in terror probes.

The NSA has not responded to a request for comment from FoxNews.com. The FBI declined to comment.

Fox News Senior Judicial Analyst Judge Napolitano said on "Fox & Friends" Tuesday that any such database could be problematic for FBI Director James Comey, since accessing it “would be revealing that the NSA does in fact have everyone’s emails, which a lot of us believe.”