Dina Pakwala-USA TODAY Network

It appears that the FBI’s criminal investigation had been stalled in 2012 and the State Department in 2013.

The email sent by Huma Abedin to Doug Band about Benghazi. | FBI

In 2013, Band and Mills met with Democratic Representative Chris Van Hollen of Maryland in December to “discuss the possibility of her joining the Clinton campaign,” according to a congressional source.

Van Hollen, who at the time chaired the panel on Oversight and Investigations of Secretary John Kerry’s State Department, has told ABC News that he never got a response to Van Hollen. His spokeswoman, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, declined to comment. Van Hollen’s spokesman, Brian Fallon, declined to comment on any of the three.

Van Hollen received the email in response to a proposal that Hillary Clinton campaign at his request, the source said.

Mills and Abedin then discussed how the committee could further investigate Clinton’s handling of the deadly 2014 attack in Benghazi, Libya.

Abedin reportedly proposed setting up a meeting the next week “between former Secretaries of State Bill Clinton and Colin Powell.” Then the two went off on new tangents, according to the source.

‘This investigation is now a criminal investigation’

It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of the legal situation of this case.

The emails released by the FBI and the Justice Department reveal a Clinton team intent on pursuing a criminal investigation against the sitting secretary of State, including perjury, obstruction of justice and theft. If the Justice Department has indicted Hillary Clinton, it’s hard to think of a more extreme response than to try to block a congressional hearing in federal court from happening:

“It’s now a criminal investigation,” a Republican source said recently. “The FBI told the State Department and the House Benghazi committee on Thursday that they would not do interviews because they had found additional emails to their investigation. There was no way to find out what the correspondence was so they just told the State Department and the House committee to hold off.”

But it was one staffer in particular in the Clinton team who has given the investigators real headaches: Cheryl Mills, the secretary’s closest advisor at the State Department from 2009 until late 2012. The FBI and the Justice Department, as well as the House Benghazi Committee, are now in the midst of a highly unusual cooperation agreement.

If the Justice Department is able to obtain the