Thursday’s DOJ Inspector General report covering the Obama DOJ/FBI conduct during the Hillary Clinton email investigation confirms a bombshell that had previously been hinted at through WikiLeaks disclosures:
Obama lied when he said in 2015 that he learned of Hillary Clinton’s private email server through a New York Times report.
Specifically, Obama told CBS News the following a March 7, 2015 report:
President Obama only learned of Hillary Clinton’s private email address use for official State Department business after a New York Times report, he told CBS News in an interview
CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante asked Mr. Obama when he learned about her private email system after his Saturday appearance in Selma, Alabama.
‘The same time everybody else learned it through news reports,’ the president told Plante. –CBS
The OIG report reveals this was a lie. A footnote on page 89 reads “President Barack Obama was one of the 13 individuals with whom Clinton had direct contact using her clintonemail.com account“
What’s more, FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok told the Inspector General that the top brass of the agency wrestled over whether or not to include Obama’s involvement in Clinton’s exoneration statement – and that former FBI Director James Comey knew Obama had lied:
“A paragraph [in Comey’s “exoneration” statement] summarizing the factors that led the FBI to assess that it was possible that hostile actors accessed Clinton’s server was added, and at one point referenced Clinton’s use of her private email for an exchange with then President Obama while in the territory of a foreign adversary,” the IG report reads. “This reference later was changed to ‘another senior government official,’ and ultimately was omitted.”
Obama knew about Hillary’s secret e-mail scheme, because she e-mailed him using her private address “while in the territory of a foreign adversary.” That finding was removed from Comey’s statement exonerating Clinton. pic.twitter.com/vlrYvWqt9f
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) June 14, 2018
My recollection is that the early Comey speech drafts included references to emails that Secretary Clinton had with President Obama and I think there was some conversation about, well do we want to be that specific? -Peter Strzok
We already knew all of this though…
In October of 2016, a round of emails released by WikiLeaks featured an email from top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills reacting Obama’s statement that he didn’t know about Obama’s server – writing to John Podesta “we need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov”
Here’s how top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills reacted to news that Obama claimed he didn’t know about Clinton’s private server. pic.twitter.com/Q7B4Nwd2yq
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) October 25, 2016
White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest later claimed that Obama was simply “not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up,” and that “The President, 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 Washington Examiner, meanwhile, reported in October 2016 that FBI agents “revealed in notes from their closed investigative file that Obama communicated with Clinton on her private server using a pseudonym.”