An email chain published by WikiLeaks today indicates Hillary Clinton’s staff realized there was a serious problem with President Obama’s narrative about Clinton’s use of her private email account after the story broke in the New York Times on March 2, 2015.
Obama, you’ll recall, was asked when he had learned of Clinton’s private email server in a March 7 interview with CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante:
“The same time everybody else learned it through news reports,” the president told Plante. “The policy of my administration is to encourage transparency, which is why my emails, the BlackBerry I carry around, all those records are available and archived,” Mr. Obama said. “I’m glad that Hillary’s instructed that those emails about official business need to be disclosed.”
When asked about it during an interview with 60 Minutes in the fall of 2015, Obama again said he didn’t know about about Clinton’s use of a private email server. And he blamed Republicans for ginning up the issue for political gain:
Today’s WikiLeaks emails show that on March 7, Team Hillary understood that Obama’s claim that he had been in the dark about Clinton’s highly improper email server was highly problematic for everyone concerned because they knew there were emails out there between the two waiting to be discovered.
Upon hearing what Obama said to Bill Plante on CBS, Hillary Clinton Chief-of-Staff Cheryl Mills emailed John Podesta in panic: “we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov,” she wrote.
In January of 2016, the State Department announced that 18 email chains between the president and Clinton from her time as secretary of State had been discovered. State Department Spokesman John Kirby said at a briefing on January 30 that the State Department would not be releasing the emails, citing a need to “protect the President’s ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel but will ultimately be released in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.”
Recently released FBI interview notes with Huma Abedin also revealed that Obama had used a pseudonymous email account: “Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed: ‘How is this not classified?'” the report says. “Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.”
The Wiki:eaks email above is about as close to “smoking gun” proof as you can get that Team Clinton knew that Obama knew, and wanted to mitigate the damage as well as they could before news of the emails got out.
WikiLeaks earlier this month published an email between John Podesta and Mills titled “Special Category” in reference to emails to and from POTUS: “we should hold emails to and from potus? That’s the heart of his exec privilege. We could get them to ask for that. They may not care, but I(t) seems like they will,” Podesta said.
Was that the extent of the “clean up” effort? Or was more done to cover up the lies of the president and Hillary Clinton? And who in the media is going to press this?
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