When the New York Times revealed that Hillary Clinton conducted official government business over an unsecure, improper, national security-endangering email server last March, President Obama told Americans that he discovered this fact on the news, just like everyone else. When top Hillary aide (and recipient of a highly unusual immunity arrangement from the FBI) Cheryl Mills learned of Obama's answer, she sprang into action. Via hacked Wikileaks emails:
Here's how top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills reacted to news that Obama claimed he didn't know about Clinton's private server. pic.twitter.com/Q7B4Nwd2yq
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) October 25, 2016
"We need to clean this up," she said. Sure enough, a few days later, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest conceded that why yes, of course Obama and Clinton had emailed each other, but the president wasn't aware of the extent of her set-up. This was an admission that Obama's knowledge of her use of private email was "deeper than he initially acknowledged," according to The Hill. Obama's defenders are now claiming that there's no lie here thanks to Earnest's disclosure, but in the original transcript, the president denied knowledge that Clinton was "using an email system outside of the US government for official business." That's what raised a red flag for Mills, who fired off this line to John Podesta: "He has emails from her -- they do not say state.gov." Mills knew this was a problem. Obama may not have realized she was running a bootleg server out of her basement, but he must have known she was using an outside email system because he was personally emailing her on it, under a pseudonym. Are we to believe that Obama simply didn't notice that he was typing in '@clintonemail.com' as opposed to '@state.gov"? The recipient field of the email didn't magically auto-populate from the get-go. Another good point by Phil Kerpen:
"What if he just saw 'Hillary Clinton'?" ignores that her from line didn't look like that.
— Phil Kerpen (@kerpen) October 25, 2016
H <hrod17@clintonemail.com>
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Was the President of the United States unconcerned about exchanging official emails with his Secretary of State over an unofficial, under-secure system? Apparently so -- unless, of course, they were exclusively swapping yoga stories and kitten memes. That's not just unlikely on its face; recall that when Huma Abedin was shown an Obama/Hillary email during an FBI interview, she exclaimed, "how is this not classified?" If they weren't discussing government business in these emails, then let's see them. Any redactions would be very minimal, right? Thousands of classified emails, including top-secret-and-above messages, passed through Clinton's email server, including more than 100 that she herself sent. She has lied about virtually every element of this story for more than a year.
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