President Barack Obama was fully aware of Hillary Clinton's private email system even while he was claiming in a news interview he learned about it from watching the news, according to an email exchange released Tuesday by WikiLeaks.
In an interview with CBS News in March 2015, reporter Bill Plante asked Obama when he first learned that his former secretary of state "used an email system outside the U.S. government."
"The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports," Obama replied.
But the email exchange released by WikiLeaks shows Clinton spokesman Josh Schwerin immediately noticed the comments were at odds with reality.
"You probably have more on this, but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news," Schwerin wrote to other members of the staff.
Cheryl Mills, who was Clinton's State Department chief of staff, wrote to John Podesta – who is currently Clinton's presidential campaign chairman – "We need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov."
Clinton Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri and senior Clinton adviser Philippe Reines discussed the issue further in the early morning hours of the next day.
"One of us should connect with the [White House] just so they know that the email will show his statement to not make sense," Reines wrote.
Palmieri told Reines to discuss the matter with White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest or others in the communications department.
"They know POTUS and HRC emailed," Palmieri said. "Josh has been asked about that. Standard practice is not to confirm anything about his email, so his answer to press was that he would not comment/confirm. I recollect that Josh was also asked if POTUS ever noticed her personal email account and he said something like POTUS likely had better things to do than focus on his Cabinet's email addresses."
At the March 9 White House press briefing, Earnest said: "The point that the president was making is not that he didn't know Secretary Clinton's email address, he did," Fox News reports.
"But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act."
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump told a crowd in Sanford, Florida that the email exchange shows "Obama is now in on the act."
Trump said Obama personally hates the Clintons, but was willing to push her for the White House because "he didn't want to get caught up in the big lie. He is caught up now, folks."
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