New revelations from Wikileaks seem to prove that the White House knew about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server. President Obama previously denied that he had any prior knowledge of Clinton’s “homebrew” server, but Wikileaks documents suggest that the president used a pseudonym to correspond directly with Clinton’s private email address and then lied about it.
Back in March 2015, as the email scandal was breaking, President Obama said, in essence, that he did not have textual relations with Hillary’s private server. Obama told CBS News that he learned of the server at “the same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”
Obama’s denial seems to have triggered a crisis in the Clinton campaign. Andrew McCarthy at National Review points out that the same day that Obama made his comments, Josh Scherwin, the Clinton campaign secretary, emailed an alert to several Clinton staffers including Jennifer Palmieri: “Jen, you probably have more on this but it looks like POTUS just said he found out HRC was using her personal email when he saw it in the news.”
McCarthy then traced the email from one of the original recipients, Nick Merrill, to Clinton attorney and aide, Cheryl Mills. Mills then emailed John Podesta, chairman of Hillary’s campaign. Mills told Podesta, “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.”
The Mills email is damning evidence that President Obama received emails from Hillary’s private email account. It would have been impossible for the White House to not be aware that Clinton was using a private server if she had used the private email account to conduct state business with the president.
Eventually, 18 emails between Clinton and Obama were identified. On January 29, 2016 at the daily press briefing, Josh Kirby announced that the emails were “being withheld to remain confidential, to protect the President’s ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel. And they ultimately will be released in accordance with the Presidential Records Act.” Kirby didn’t cite executive privilege, but it amounted to the same thing.
The 18 emails not only prove that Obama lied about his ignorance of Hillary’s private server, they also provide a motive for his administration to interfere with the FBI investigation of Hillary’s handling of classified information. If Hillary was guilty of mishandling classified information and had engaged in email exchanges with the president, then the president would be guilty as well.
McCarthy noted that executive privilege could not shield the president if Hillary was indicted or was the target of a grand jury investigation. “In its famous Watergate ruling, United States v. Nixon,” McCarthy wrote, “the Supreme Court held that an invocation of executive privilege to secure the confidentiality of presidential communications will not shield those communications from disclosure if they are relevant evidence in a grand-jury investigation or a criminal trial.
With President Obama linked to the private server and complicit in the cover up, Rep. Trey Gowdy’s (R-S.C.) grilling of FBI Director James Comey comes to mind. On CNBC, Gowdy said, “In your old job you would prove intent as you referenced by showing the jury evidence of a complex scheme that was designed for the very purpose of concealing the public record and you would be arguing in addition to concealment the destruction that you and i just talked about or certainly the failure to preserve.”
Now there is evidence that the president was involved in the same scheme to conceal Clinton’s purposeful mishandling of classified information. That means that President Obama is as guilty as Hillary Clinton. Not indicting Hillary was not for the benefit of the Clintons. It was to protect Barack Obama.
Originally published on The Resurgent
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