WASHINGTON — A senior State Department official asked the FBI last year to help reduce the classification of an e-mail from Hillary Clinton’s private server, according to FBI investigative files that have been made public.

It was to be part of a bargain that would have allowed the FBI to deploy more agents in foreign countries, according to the files. It was not immediately clear whether the State Department official or someone at the FBI first raised the prospect of a bargain over the e-mail’s classification.

The bureau records, citing an FBI official whose name was censored, said that Undersecretary for Management Patrick F. Kennedy sought assistance in exchange for a “quid pro quo.”

But the FBI said Monday, as the documents were released, that it was the now-retired FBI official who first asked Kennedy about deploying more agents overseas. The State Department said the same.

“This allegation is inaccurate and does not align with the facts,” State Department spokesman Mark Toner said. He said Kennedy had been trying to understand the FBI’s classification decisions, and added that there was never an increase in the number of FBI agents assigned to Iraq as a result of the conversations.

The FBI ultimately rejected the idea, which would have allowed the State Department to archive a message related to the 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in the basement of its Washington headquarters “never to be seen again,” according to the FBI files.

The e-mail described reports in November 2012 that Libyan police were arresting suspects in the attack. It had been forwarded to Clinton’s private e-mail address by Jake Sullivan, one of her top aides and the department’s director of policy planning, who was using his government e-mail account.

Republicans seized on the report as collusion within the Obama administration to protect Clinton, now the Democratic presidential nominee.

According to the FBI records, a bureau official said Kennedy “asked his assistance in altering the e-mail’s classification in exchange for a ‘quid pro quo,”’ and that in exchange, “State would reciprocate by allowing the FBI to place more agents in countries where they are presently forbidden.”