Video transcript
A newly released FBI file showed President Obama used a pseudonym to exchange emails with then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Political advisers worried pay-to-play allegations could overshadow the beginning of her White House bid. And while he downplayed all of this on Sunday, Mook wrote a February 2015 email marked Foundation vulnerability points, which listed out two pages of problems that could hamper the campaign, including donations from foreign governments like Morocco, private jets and pricey hotels. These are stolen documents. And then there's a new email dragging President Obama deeper into the controversy over Clinton's private email account and server. Mr. President, when did you first learn that Hillary Clinton used an email system outside the U.S. government for official business while she was Secretary of State? At the same time, everybody else learned it through news reports. That comment triggered immediate alarm from Clinton's top advisers. Cheryl Mills writing, "We need to clean this up. He has emails from her. They do not say State.gov." White House spokesman Josh Earnest tonight is stressing the president never said he did not trade emails with Clinton. He just didn't know the details about her server. President Obama has a highly secured Blackberry that he uses to get emails, and it has two functions. One is to mask his physical location when he's using it, and the second is to make sure every email, every text message, every phone call has been vetted and preapproved for him to receive. It's called whitelisting. So if you or I had the president's email, if we sent him a message, it would be blocked and it would bounce back. So the question is, did he receive the Clinton emails on the Blackberry? And if so, when did his team direct the White House Communications Office to accept that email and whitelist it? Because it's a very deliberate act, it doesn't happen by accident. Yeah, you've got to get cleared in, right? Correct. Just like you've got to get cleared into the White House, you've got to get it cleared into the president's email list. Now we know that he did exchange emails with her when she was writing emails from her private server. Correct. Now the question, I guess, is whether he received those emails on a computer somewhere or whether he computed on his little Blackberry, which requires the extra step of getting it cleared, right? That's right. And the question here is whether his staff asked for her address to be added to that Blackberry before March of 2015. That's when he said, "I first learned about the server from news reports." That's when the New York Times reported the story. But everything that we see suggests that he was receiving emails from her on the Blackberry prior to that period. Right. And we know, of course, that those emails from her did not say Hillary Clinton at state got gov, right? That's right, exactly. Which would have been the normal internal system. That's right. But it's also understandable to me, however, that if she was in his address book, she would have been there under the name. And if I send you an email on the Fox system, I look up your name and I don't know the particulars of the address. I just know that it goes to you. I looked at it. I could find it. But you might not notice that. That's right. But someone, I was told, either the chief of staff or deputy chief of staff would have to take a directive from the president to add an address. And if you just look at that simple address, even if you're not an IT wizard, you see that it's not a government address. If you know it at state.gov, right? That's right. You see clintonemail.com. And that tells you that there is a registered domain for that address. And it was being used for government business. So either a staffer or the president himself must have done this. It would likely be the chief of staff. If he received them on his black brand, we don't know that, correct? Everything suggests that these emails were received on the black brand. It would make sense that they would be on the black brand. Because they had so many in-person meetings, it wasn't a situation where emails were being received routinely on a desktop computer in the Oval Office. At that particular time, I guess the blackberry was a thing, especially for Mr. Obama, who had gotten accustomed to using one before he took office. That's correct. And she wanted, remember, in the emails we saw released by the State Department, Cheryl Mills, her principal chief of staff at the State Department, wanted to see whether Hillary Clinton could also get one of these sort of Brinks truck type blackberries, like what the president had, so that she could communicate. But again, it goes back to when she was whitelisted. When did that email get approved to be received? And it takes us to the age-old question, what did the president know, and when did he know it?
Transcribed automatically. Expect errors in names and numbers.
