Clinton aide frets over emails sent to Obama

Aide’s hacked email is made public by WikiLeaks.

WASHINGTON — In a March 2015 interview, President Barack Obama said that he had learned about Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”

But that asser tion concerned aides of Clinton, who knew that the president himself had received emails from the private address, according to a hacked email made public Tuesday by WikiLeaks.

“We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov,” Cheryl D. Mills, a top aide, wrote to John D. Podesta, another senior adviser, on March 7, 2015.

Two days later, Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, tried to clarify the president’s remarks, saying that he had, in fact, exchanged emails with Clinton through her private account. But Earnest suggested that the president had no idea the emails could be a problem, because he had relied on Clinton to make sure that using a private account did not break any laws.

“The point that the president was making is not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address — he did — but he was not aware of the details of how that email address and server had been set up, or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act,” Earnest said on March 9.

For Clinton, the use of the private email account to conduct State Department business has been a const ant source of criticism during her presidential campaign, prompting a series of explanations and apologies from her and her aides, and even an FBI investigation.

The email exchange made public on Tuesday highlighted how the issue was quickly viewed with deep concern not only for Clinton, but also for her political ally and former boss, the president.

The release also followed months of Republican arguments that the Obama administration had coordinated with the Clinton campaign to limit the damage from the emails, up to and including the Justice Department’s decision this summer not to prosecute her.

Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Clinton’s campaign, declined to comment on Mills’ email to Podesta, just as the campaign has declined to discuss any of the tens of thousands of internal campaign-related emails that have been released by WikiLeaks over the last month. The emails were hacked from the account of Podesta, who is now the campaign’s chairman, and the campaign has blamed the Russian government for breaking into his account in an attempt to help Donald Trump defeat Clinton on Nov. 8.

The president’s spokesman said Tuesday that Obama’s original comment that he had not known about the private email server was accurate.

“I recognize that some of the president’s critics have attempted to construct some type of conspiracy about the communication between the president and the secretary of state, but they’ve failed to put forward a conspiracy that withstands any scrutiny,” Earnest said.

Clinton’s use of a private, nongovernmental email server to c onduc t S t ate Depar t - ment business raised concerns about whether she had exposed classified information to hacking. The FBI concluded that while she had been “extremely careless,” ultimately she had committed no crime.

Besides the implication that the Clinton team had worked to protect Obama, the messages about Clinton’s private email server, like others recently released by WikiLeaks, revealed the kind of stagecraft and damage control that go on behind the scenes of a modern political campaign.