CNN anchor Brian Stelter said Sunday it’s “kind of strange” that President Obama indicated in a recent interview that he did not correspond with Hillary Clinton over email during her tenure as secretary of state.
In an interview on CBS News over the weekend, Obama said he did not know his top foreign policy staffer was using a nonofficial email account during the four years she was reporting directly to him.
The president says he learned of Clinton’s email practices, which appear to violate security norms as well as federal law on record keeping, “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”
“When you hear the president say to CBS that he found out [about the controversy] through the media, doesn’t that mean that they never emailed?” Stelter said on CNN, where he was interviewing Gawker editor John Cook. “Isn’t that kind of strange?”
“That is kind of strange,” Cook replied.
It was reported last week that Clinton exclusively used the private email address “[email protected]” to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state, though federal rules require that electronic communications take place through government email accounts. Clinton also reportedly oversaw a home email server registered to the apparently fictitious person “Eric Hoteham.”
Relying solely on a private email account and a personal server makes it difficult or impossible for journalists and the public at large to get a full record of the 2016 presidential hopeful’s work at Foggy Bottom.
UPDATE:The White House said on Monday that Obama’s remarks in the CBS interview were not meant to indicate he had not communicated with Clinton over email.
“The president, as I think many people expect, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his secretary of state,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest said. “I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email each other.”
This story was first published at 12:23 p.m. and has been updated.
