Remember when Barack Obama professed ignorance of Hillary Clinton’s use of a secret e-mail system during her tenure as Secretary of State? The President could not have been more unequivocal last October, when he told 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft that he had no knowledge of it at all:
KROFT: Did you know about Hillary Clinton’s use of private… private email server —
OBAMA: No.
KROFT: — while she was secretary of state?
OBAMA: No.
Like most Obama statements, this one came with an expiration date. New releases from the FBI investigation show that Obama communicated with Hillary over her clintonemail.com server, clearly making his statement to Kroft a lie. In fact, it even surprised Huma Abedin, who wondered aloud when the FBI asked about it how those communications couldn’t have been classified:
President Barack Obama used a pseudonym in email communications with Hillary Clinton and others, according to FBI records made public Friday. …
In an April 5, 2016 interview with the FBI, Abedin was shown an email exchange between Clinton and Obama, but the longtime Clinton aide did not recognize the name of the sender.
“Once informed that the sender’s name is believed to be pseudonym used by the president, Abedin exclaimed: ‘How is this not classified?'” the report says. “Abedin then expressed her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym and asked if she could have a copy of the email.”
The White House has tried to keep its distance from the scandal, but this might make that a little more difficult. It’s clear that the FBI has tried to help out in that regard, too. This came out late yesterday, long after the Friday news cycle had closed. It’s the second Friday-night document dump in a row for the FBI in this investigation, making their political aim clear — to minimize this as much as possible.
The FBI and the White House have a lot of explaining to do now, but don’t expect them to do it willingly. Obama will no doubt waste little time in invoking executive privilege when Congress starts demanding answers, perhaps with some justification — as it pertains to the content of the communications. Their very existence, however, shows that Obama offered bald-faced lies on national television to Kroft and to voters, and that’s not covered by executive privilege.
Update: Did Hillary use a State Department account for a back-up? No, she used Gmail:
Hillary Clinton created a previously undisclosed email account to communicate when her private server system was down, documents made public by the FBI Friday show.
Monica Hanley, a former Clinton aide, told FBI investigators that Clinton likely created the second private account — a “gmail.com” address — to send messages when her server crashed in 2011 during a trip to Croatia.
An FBI report made public earlier this month showed Clinton and her staff had been warned repeatedly about using private accounts while overseas. What’s more, Clinton and her staff have repeatedly said the former secretary of state used just one personal address.
It’s amazing that the FBI managed to expose so many of the claims from Hillary and the White House as drizzly effluvium … and yet still found no intent to break the law. Hmmmmm.
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