President Obama’s accounting of his email correspondence with Hillary Clinton when she was his secretary of state is “entirely factual,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Tuesday.
“I can’t verify the integrity of these emails,” Earnest told reporters traveling with Obama as he fundraised in California, speaking of illegally obtained messages from Clinton’s campaign chairman, John Podesta, that were published by WikiLeaks and apparently show the Clinton camp challenging Obama’s assertion that he didn’t know Clinton was using a private email account.
Podesta’s emails were “stolen,” and, therefore, their authenticity cannot be verified. Furthermore, they were released “to undermine our democracy,” Earnest said.
“The president did trade emails with Secretary Clinton, not a large number of them,” he said. “Of course the president had possession of Secretary Clinton’s email address, but he did not have any knowledge of where her server was located or what sort of arrangements had been made to store her email.
“What the president said was an entirely factual response to” a question during a March 2015 interview with CBS News. “I recognize that some of the president’s critics have attempted to construct some type of conspiracy about the communication between the president and the secretary of state, but they’ve failed to put forward a conspiracy that withstands any scrutiny, so I guess they’re back to recycling thoroughly debunked conspiracies,” Earnest said.
