White House: Obama Knew Clinton's Email Address

President Barack Obama was aware of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email address, White House spokesman Josh Earnest said, even though the president himself said he first learned about her private account from news reports.

Earnest tried to explain Monday what Obama really meant in an interview with CBS News, when asked if that mean there were no emails between the two.

“The president, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with the secretary of state," Earnest said. "I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email one another."

AP Photo/Susan Walsh

Clinton didn't have a government email address while serving as secretary of state during Obama’s first term, instead using an account operated from a server set up in her home. Obama told CBS he found out about Clinton's emails “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.”

“The point the president was making was not that he didn’t know Secretary Clinton’s email address. He did,” Earnest said. “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 record law.”

“The point is, the president did email with Secretary Clinton. I assume that he recognized the email address that he was emailing back, but, again, the question here is about compliance with the Federal Records Act,” Earnest said. “Understandably, the kinds of things that a president and 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. What is clear, as the president said in his interview, the emails that he sends are properly maintained consistent with the Presidential Records Act.”