The president, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his secretary of state,” Earnest said. Earnest: Obama, Hillary corresponded via her personal email

President Barack Obama communicated via email with Hillary Clinton while she used her personal email, according to the White House.

In a press briefing on Monday, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said that Obama did correspond with his secretary of state via her private email address.


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

Earnest’s admission comes after Obama said on CBS on Saturday that he learned about Clinton’s use of a private email and server “the same time everybody else learned it, through news reports.” According to Earnest, this comment should not be assumed to mean that Obama and Clinton never emailed back and forth.

“The point that the president was making is 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 Records Act.”

When pressed on whether Obama was aware that Clinton was conducting business over her private email, Earnest responded, “the point is the president did email with Secretary Clinton. I assume that he recognized the email address that he was emailing back to,” before saying that the important issue is whether she complied with the Federal Records Act.

Follow @politico