President Barack Obama emailed with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton but was unaware of how her personal email address was set up, the White House said on March 9.

Josh Earnest told reporters that Barack Obama emailed to Hillary Clinton’s private address and did not know how the secretary of State planned to comply with the Federal Records Act with regards to private emails about official State Department business.

“The president did email with Secretary Clinton,” Earnest said, who said the number of emails was not large. 

“The president did, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office exchange emails with his secretary of state,” the White House press secretary said.

Barack Obama emailed to Hillary Clinton’s private address (Photo AP)

All exchanges between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were maintained by the White House under the Presidential Records Act, Josh Earnest said.

The comments come amid a budding controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email address hosted on a home server while serving as the nation’s top diplomat. The email controversy has cast a shadow over her all-but-certain presidential bid and provoked questions about tensions between her and the Obama administration.

The State Department did not initially retain records of Hillary Clinton’s personal emails.

Hillary Clinton’s team recently selected and turned over 55,000 pages of emails in response to a State Department request.

Barack Obama told CBS News on March 8 that he learned of Hillary Clinton’s use of her personal email address for official business “the same time everybody else learned about it through news reports”.

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