WASHINGTON ― Newly released emails show Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign reacted swiftly when President Barack Obama said he learned about her private server use for official business.
Clinton aide Cheryl Mills sent a note to campaign chairman John Podesta after Obama said in March 2015 that he learned about the controversial email practices “the same time everybody else learned it,” from news reports.
“We need to clean this up ― he has emails from her ― they do not say state.gov,” Mills said in a March 7 missive. The whistleblower group WIkiLeaks released the email Tuesday as part of its ongoing publication of the contents of Podesta’s hacked email account.
At a briefing two days later, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that Obama had, in fact, received emails from Clinton’s private account ― though he didn’t realize it was hosted on a private server.
“Yes, the president was aware of her email address; he traded emails with her,” Earnest said. “That shouldn’t be a surprise that the president of the United States is going to trade emails with the secretary of state. But the president was not aware of the fact that this was a personal email server.”
Clinton has repeatedly apologized for her use of a private email server and email account, which she has called a mistake.
Republican presidential nominee DonaldTrump has said Clinton should be prosecuted for mishandling classified information. After investigating the former secretary of state’s email use, FBI director James Comey said she had been “extremely careless” but didn’t violate the law. Trump has said if he wins the presidency he’d appoint a special prosecutor and that Clinton would be “in jail” under a Trump administration.
The Podesta emails WikiLeaks is publishing are not from the private server. U.S. government officials have said Russia has been supplying WikiLeaks with hacked Democratic emails in an apparent effort to sway the presidential election. It hasn’t done a whole of good for Trump, who is lagging badly in the polls.
On Tuesday, Clinton campaign spokesman Glen Caplin did not comment directly on the campaign emails, which the campaign has refused to confirm are real even though there’s no real reason to think they’re not.
“It’s troubling to see today that the Republican House Homeland Security Chairman Mike McCaul told Donald Trump that Russia is using hacked information to influence the election but Trump refused to accept it,” Caplin said. “Trump has also ignored the clear findings of the U.S. intelligence community while calling for more espionage and cheering on WikiLeak’s Russian-directed propaganda.”
Trump pounced on the Mills email as evidence Obama knew about the private server early last year.
“Well, I now see why the president stuck up for Hillary, because he didn’t want to be dragged into it this,” Trump said in an interview with Reuters. “Because he knew all about her private server.”
“This is a big thing,” Trump said. “This means that he has to be investigated.”
This story has been updated to include additional comments from Trump’s Reuters interview.