Clinton-Obama emails to be held
The messages won’t be released publicly, the White House says, citing legal precedent.
WASHINGTON — Emails exchanged between President Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton while she was serving as secretary of State may remain secret until long after Obama leaves the White House.
Obama administration officials say they will not publicly release the exchanges, citing legal precedent that allows presidents to keep such communications confidential. The White House intentions were first reported Friday by the New York Times.
Fewer than two dozen emails passed between Clinton and Obama, and they were “largely nonsubstantive,” a person with knowledge of the exchanges said.
But White House officials say they fear a release of the emails would undermine a long-standing tradition of presidents being able to receive uninhibited advice from their advisors. Other presidents, they note, have also kept such communications confidential until years after leaving office.
The White House acknowledgment came as the State Department released an additional 7,000 pages of messages on Friday that Clinton had sent or received while serving as the nation’s top diplomat.
The disclosure was part of the continuing saga over Clinton’s government email, which she routed through a private server.
The administration has been under a court order to release the tens of thousands of messages publicly, in monthly batches. With the latest set, just over half have been disclosed.
It is unclear whether Clinton and Obama emailed each other during the timespan of the other Clinton emails the State Department has made public.
So far, the disclosed Clinton emails have not proven particularly revealing. Republicans on the House Select Committee on Benghazi who hoped the messages would help break new ground in their probe of how Clinton handled the 2012 attacks in that Libyan city have found no new smoking guns.
But Obama’s move to keep his exchanges with Clinton secret may yet give them new fodder.
The White House had previously acknowledged that Clinton and Obama exchanged messages on occasion, a revelation that called into question Obama’s assertion that he was unaware Clinton had used a private email server.
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in March that Obama was aware of Clinton’s unorthodox email address, “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.... The kinds of things that a president and his secretary of State talk about are pretty weighty national issues. I’m not sure that they drilled all the way down to the Federal Records Act.”
A senior administration official noted Friday that messages Clinton exchanged with others at the White House have already been disclosed.
“We presume those communications will ultimately be made public, along with the rest of the president’s records, after he leaves office,” said the official, who would not be named while discussing Obama’s private records.