White House press secretary Josh Earnest Wednesday declined to say whether President Obama uses a private or a government email address, claiming the president’s personal security as a reason for withholding an answer.
“I’m not going to be in a position to talk about the president’s email address for a variety of reasons,” Earnest told reporters Wednesday when asked if Obama uses a private or a dot-gov email address.
Earnest said Obama takes the law that governs his email use very seriously and “all the emails that the president sends are governed by that.”
He appeared reluctant to react to Hillary Clinton’s press conference Tuesday, in which the presumptive Democratic candidate for president in 2016 stated she set up the private email server and used it exclusively during her time as secretary of state as a matter of convenience.
The State Department has already taken steps to preserve and make public tens of thousand of Clinton’s private emails on official business, he said.
Earnest said he wasn’t interested in Clinton’s admission that she deleted nearly 30,000 emails she deemed personal from her private server.
“The secretary’s handling of her own personal email and the maintenance of her own email inbox is not something I’m particularly interested in,” he said.The White House also repeatedly declined to say whether the State Department lived up to the Obama’s campaign promise to run the most transparent administration in history.
The Associated Press investigated the State Department’s record on responding to Freedom of Information Act requests and found that State takes more than 450 days to respond to the request, more than 30 times longer than the Treasury Department responded and longer even than the CIA took to respond.
The Associated Press is now suing the federal government over its State Department FOIA requests that went unfulfilled apparently because the department didn’t have access to Clinton’s emails.
Earnest repeated several times that the State Department is responsible for handling their email and making sure it comports with the Federal Records Act.
While he said he didn’t have the “metrics” on hand on how the Obama administration has improved the FOIA practice, he said he would get back to reporters with them.
“I’ll get you some additional metrics about the record of this administration,” he said.
Asked if the White House trusts Clinton to determine which emails are personal and which are official, Earnest said “there’s not been any evidence that’s been produced to raise any doubts about that.”
“Because they have all been deleted,” the reporter snapped back.
