President Obama and Hillary Clinton exchanged emails when the former secretary of state relied exclusively on a private account, the White House said Monday.
However, Obama’s top spokesman said the president was unaware of the “details” of how Clinton planned to disclose her emails, as required by law.
“The president … did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his secretary of state,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters Monday. “I would not describe the number of emails as large. But they did have the occasion to email one another.”
However, Earnest said the exchange of emails was not indicative of any wrongdoing by the president.
“He was not aware of the details of how that email address and server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act,” Earnest explained.
Clinton, the presumptive frontrunner for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination, has been on the defensive for relying solely on a private email account to conduct business as secretary of state. She also used a private email server traced back to her family home in New York.
The White House has attempted to distance itself from the Clinton scandal, with limited success.
Obama told CBS in an interview over the weekend that he learned about the Clinton emails at “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”
The White House comments Monday represented the first acknowledgement that Obama and Clinton had traded emails.
“I assume that he recognized the email address he was emailing back,” Earnest said of Obama. “The question here is about compliance with the Federal Records Act.”
