President Barack Obama told CBS News in March 2015 that he learned about Hillary Clinton's private email server 'through news reports.' Clinton aide talked of needing to 'clean' up Obama's comments on email server

A top Hillary Clinton aide expressed alarm in early 2015 that President Barack Obama claimed he was unaware of Clinton's private email server until he learned about it in the news.

"We need to clean this up - he has emails from her - they do not say state.gov," said Clinton adviser Cheryl Mills in a hacked email posted Tuesday on WikiLeaks.


As the scandal over Clinton's use of a private email server was still emerging in March 2015, Obama told CBS News that he learned about the arrangement through the media. "The same time everybody else learned it through news reports," Obama told CBS News' Bill Plante.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest later clarified that while the president knew about Clinton’s email address, he “was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up.”

Clinton's campaign declined to confirm the authenticity of the emails. White House spokesman Eric Schultz pointed to Earnest's comments from March when asked for comment about the email exchange.

