Newly released emails that suggest President Obama may have been aware of Hillary Clinton‘s private email server prove that he is “caught up” in the Democratic presidential hopeful’s “big lie,” Donald Trump said Tuesday.
“As you may remember, President Obama claimed to have no knowledge whatsoever of Hillary Clinton‘s illegal email server,” the Republican presidential hopeful told his supporters at a rally in Sanford, Fla.
“‘I have no knowledge of it. I don’t know,'” Trump said, mocking Obama. “This guy, he’s as bad as she is.”
Trump described the emails between Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, Cheryl Mills, and several top campaign staffers as “one of the most shocking revelations to date” regarding the president’s knowledge of his secretary of state’s unsecured email server.
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Hours after Obama told CBS News on March 7, 2015 that he had learned about Clinton’s server “the same time everybody else learned it through news reporters,” Mills wrote to Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta: “We need to clean this up — he has emails from her — they do not say state.gov.”
Philippe Reines, a senior adviser to Clinton, confirmed in a separate email chain the following day that Obama was aware that Clinton had been using a non-governmental email address because they had communicated via email on several occasions.
“One of us should connect with the [White House] just so they know that the email will show his statement to not make sense,” he wrote to the former secretary of state’s communications director, Jennifer Palmieri.
“In other words, Mills was saying Obama, he had to know that Hillary was using an illegal server, but he claimed otherwise,” Trump said in Florida. “So that means Obama is now into the act.”
“Now I understand one thing, that despite [Obama’s] hatred of the Clintons… I understand why he pushed her,” he told the crowd, referring to Obama’s endorsement of the Democratic presidential hopeful.
“He didn’t want to get caught up in the big lie,” Trump charged, adding that the Obama is “caught up now, folks.”
