Officials in the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton’s personal office learned in August that a House committee had discovered Clinton's use of private email as secretary of State, and they sat on the potentially "explosive" information until news reports forced their hand,
Politico reports.
"Sources familiar with the discussions say key people in the Obama administration and on Clinton’s staff were aware that the revelation could be explosive for the all-but-announced candidate for president," Politico reports.
But those involved deferred to Clinton’s aides, and they decided not to respond," Politico reports.
That changed this week when The New York Times revealed that Clinton had conducted official State Department business exclusively through private email accounts, in possible violation of federal record-keeping laws.
The Clinton camp's failure to respond sooner has political strategists wondering how the Democrats' odds-on presidential nominee for 2016 could fail to "get out ahead of bad news," Politico reports.
But a Clinton spokesperson, Nick Merrill, insisted to Politco that there was nothing to "get ahead" of.
"This was perfectly permissible and the practice of past secretaries," Merrill said of Clinton's nongovernmental email setup, "and not only did she turn over all pertinent emails, she has taken the extraordinary step of now asking them to be released to the public. When that’s done, which we hope is soon, it will become clear that it's all in there and then some.”
The question hanging over Washington today is who gets to decide what's "pertinent."
Skeptics say Clinton
could well have sanitized the 55,000 pages' worth of emails she turned over to the State Department, picking and choosing the material self-protectively.
Sources told Politico that State Department officials in August first noted Clinton's personal email address turning up on documents requested by the House select committee probing the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
Politico reports that "State and White House officials conferred on how to handle the revelation, which they expected the committee to notice.
"But they felt that Clinton’s personal staff should take the lead, since she was no longer in government, and Clinton aides decided to wait and see," Politico reports.
As for when President Barack Obama found out about Clinton's off-the-books email setup, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said on Friday that he has "no idea,"
The Hill reports.
"I wouldn't be surprised, however, if he had learned about that by reading the newspaper," said Earnest. "The president has a lot of things on his plate."
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