President Barack Obama said on Saturday that he found out about Hillary Clinton's use of a personal email through recent news reports, but the White House revealed on Monday that the president actually knew of her email address long before the scandal made headlines.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters on Monday that Obama and Clinton "did have the occasion to email one another," and he assumes the president "did recognize the email address if he was emailing back to her," reported The Guardian.
"The point that the president was making is not that he didn't know Secretary Clinton's email address. He did," said Earnest. "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."
"I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email one another," Earnest continued, adding that all of Obama's emails with Clinton have been properly preserved in accordance with federal record-keeping requirements.
It was revealed last week that while Clinton was working as secretary of state, rather than using a secure government email system, she used a private email account hosted on a server that was run from her home, with the email domain hosted through a vulnerable "consumer grade" company that was hacked in 2010.
The revelations sparked concern from a number of Republicans and security experts over issues related to transparency and security.
