Barack Obama emailed Hillary Clinton several times at her personal email address, the White House said on Monday, while insisting the US president did not realise his secretary of state was operating an independent email system detached from government servers.

A day after Obama told an interviewer that he first learned details of Clinton’s unusual email arrangements from media reports, his press secretary confirmed that the president had none the less communicated with Clinton through her @clintonemail.com address.

“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,” Josh Earnest told a briefing at the White House on Monday.

“I would not describe the number of emails as large, but they did have the occasion to email one another,” he said, adding that Obama and Clinton had not discussed whether the email setup complied with federal records laws.

Earnest repeatedly sought to shift all responsibility for the email controversy to Clinton’s team and State Department officials, stressing that Obama’s own emails were “properly maintained” in line with presidential records laws.

“It is the responsibility of individual agencies to establish an email system and to make sure those emails as created are properly recorded and maintained,” he said.

Clinton is under pressure to explain why she never used a government email address during her four years as America’s most senior diplomat, and to disclose all emails relating to her work in response to inquiries from congressional investigators and public records requests.

Speculation grew on Monday afternoon that she would address the controversy in the next few days.

The State Department has said Clinton’s aides have turned over “55,000 pages” of emails for review by officials. But it is unclear what proportion of Clinton’s email archive this covers and how many messages, if any, have been held back.

It was reported by Politico on Friday that “key people” in the White House were informed in August of a congressional inquiry’s discovery that Clinton conducted government business through her private email account

Asked when he had learned of Clinton’s unusual arrangement, Obama told CBS on Sunday: “The same time everybody else learned it, through news reports”. However Earnest did not dispute on Monday that the president knew she was not using a state.gov address. “I assume that he did recognise the email address if he was emailing back to her,” he said.

Trey Gowdy, the Republican congressman leading the latest inquiry into the deadly attack on a US diplomatic station in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012, said at the weekend that he had discovered significant gaps in the timeline of Clinton emails that he received from the State Department.

Rejecting the suggestion that the White House should intervene in the dispute, Earnest advised Gowdy to “raise that directly with State Department officials”.

Saying that he had not learned of “any reason to doubt” the Clinton team’s assurance to have handed over all emails relating to Clinton’s work as secretary of state, Earnest said: “Ultimately that is the responsibility of Secretary Clinton and her team”.

Clinton steered clear of the controversy involving her use of a private email account at the State Department at a two-hour event involving her No Ceilings project at the Clinton Foundation on Monday, bringing attention instead to a report on the progress of women and girls around the globe.



The potential 2016 Democratic presidential candidate said there had never been a better time in history to be born female, but many gaps remained in the educational and economic opportunities for women and girls.

The email scrutiny centres on whether Clinton fully complied with federal laws requiring government officials to preserve written communications involving official business.