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Monday, March 9, 2015

White House: Obama emailed to Clinton's private account

White House: Obama emailed to Clinton's private account
By Jordan Fabian - 03-09-15 14:17 PM EDT

President Obama emailed with Hillary Clinton during her tenure as secretary of State but was unaware of how her personal email address was set up, the White House said Monday. 

White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters that Obama emailed to Clinton’s private address and did not know how Clinton planned to comply with the Federal Records Act with regards to private emails about official State Department business. 

“The president did email with Secretary Clinton,” Earnest said, who said the number of emails was not large. 

“The president did, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office exchange emails with his secretary of state,” Earnest said.

All exchanges between Obama and Clinton were maintained by the White House under the Presidential Records Act, he said. 

The comments come amid a budding controversy over Clinton’s use of a private email address hosted on a home server while serving as the nation’s top diplomat. The email controversy has cast a shadow over her all-but-certain presidential bid and provoked questions about tensions between her and the Obama administration.

The State Department did not initially retain records of Clinton's personal emails. Clinton’s team recently selected and turned over 55,000 pages of emails in response to a State Department request. 

Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.), the chairman of the House committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. embassy in Benghazi, Libya, said this weekend there are gaps in the emails that Clinton submitted. 

Earnest said it is up to the State Department to make sure email correspondence complies with the Federal Records Act and “respond to reasonable requests from congressional committees.”

Obama told CBS News on Sunday that he learned of Clinton’s use of her personal email address for official business “the same time everybody else learned about it through news reports.”

Earnest said Obama's comments should not be interpreted as meaning that he did not know Clinton's email address. 

“The point that the president was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address, he did," Earnest said. "But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.”

Clinton has not answered questions about her personal email address. In a tweet last week, she said she asked the State Department to release her emails from her tenure there.

Asked if the email fury has created a rift between Obama and Clinton, Earnest expressed confidence that Clinton and her advisers would turn over all private emails related to her government responsibilities. 

“They say that they have done that and I don’t see any reason to doubt that they have done exactly what they said they would do,” he said. “But ultimately that is the responsibility of Secretary Clinton and her team.”

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