White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Wednesday he doesn't know if anyone at the White House knew that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had a private server for her emails.
For the second consecutive day, President Barack Obama's spokesman seemed almost like a representative for Clinton, the presumed 2016 Democratic frontrunner. He continued to refer most questions to the State Department and said it is each government’s agency job assure official are compliant with the law.
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
The Federal Records Act requires government documents be maintained for archival purposes. The revelations that Clinton didn’t use or even have a government email address — and in fact operated off a private server from her home — comes on the heels of new questions about foreign government donations to the Clinton Foundation at the time she was leading foreign policy for the U.S. government.
A reporter asked Earnest: “Did the White House know that Secretary Clinton had her own server?”
Earnest responded, “I don’t know the answer to that.”
“As I mentioned earlier, I think the existence of knowledge about Secretary Clinton’s email was her email address,” Earnest continued. “She used that email address which we all now know did not end in @state.gov.”
Earnest said he has “no reason” to believe that Clinton’s team did not act appropriately in providing about 55,000 pages of email messages it provided to the State Department upon their request.
“Based on what we know here … it is consistent with the Federal Records Act,” Earnest said.
Also pressed about the security of a private server in comparison to a State Department server, Earnest did not know if it would be less secure, but thought it might be less of a target than a State Department server.
