Via the Standard, didn’t Obama tell CBS that he found out about Hillary’s private e-mail the same way he finds out about every government scandal, by reading the newspaper? How do you square that statement with this statement by Earnest? The spin, I guess, will be that O didn’t know the extent of Hillary’s private e-mailing and simply assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that she was doing most of her e-mailing with others from an official State Department e-mail account. It’s not against State Department policy to use private e-mail occasionally so long as you promptly copy any correspondence to your official account — which Hillary didn’t have — so that the archives pick it up. If Obama exchanged, say, six messages with her over the course of four years, he might have noticed the private address each time but failed to notice that she was using a private address every time. In theory.

But even that spin has a big problem.

https://twitter.com/DanFosterType/status/574996822218960896
https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/574995023642689536

Given how pitiful the security was for Hillary’s private server, it’s a cinch that hackers have Obama’s address now (if they didn’t already). It’s also a cinch that they have copies of any e-mails the two exchanged. Unless they were trading mindless pleasantries on the order of “congrats on the grandchild!”, it’s unfathomable to me that Obama would have discussed anything in writing with a cabinet member through a private account whose security was a question mark to him. You would think that lesson one on day one for a new president on how to use e-mail responsibly is to never correspond with a private account — ever. As it is, State still won’t say definitively, on the record, that Hillary’s homebrew server was secure.

Question one, then: How many e-mails did they exchange? Five? Fifty? If it was just one a week for four years, the number will run into the hundreds. Earnest says it was a small number but he doesn’t get specific. Time to get specific, since the greater the number is, the harder it’ll be to believe that O didn’t realize she was using private e-mail exclusively. Question two: Who told Obama it was a good idea, or at least not a bad idea, to e-mail someone’s private account? Has he been e-mailing other private accounts since 2009? How sure is he that every one of those private accounts is actually being used by the person he thinks is using it?