Beyond the 18-minute gap

Hillary Clinton arranged for a privately owned email system through which she conducted official business as Secretary of State. She has therefore selected the “55,000 pages” of emails that she has graciously turned over to the Department of State, and done so well after she departed from office.

That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. You can infer that from President Obama’s assertion that he learned about Clinton’s email practices from “news reports,” just as he learned about Lois Lerner’s illegal activities conducted on his behalf at the IRS. Referring to senior CBS White House correspondent Bill Plante’s interview of Obama last week, Michael Shear tactfully observes in the New York Times:

In the portion of the interview that was released, Mr. Obama did not address how he could have avoided noticing that Mrs. Clinton was sending emails from a “clintonemail.com” address throughout the years she served in his administration.

CBS News has now posted Plante’s full interview with Obama here. Covering a variety of subjects, the full interview is 17 minutes long.

Plante raises Clinton’s email set-up at 6:10. Having suffered through the full interview for Power Line readers — Obama discusses the alleged wrongs of voter identifications in his usual, utterly disingenuous style at the end of the interview — I can report that Obama does not address the obvious question Shear raised in the Times because Plante didn’t ask it. Pathetic!

It will be necessary for investigators with a legitimate need for any subset of Madam Clinton’s official emails, such as Rep. Trey Gowdy, to subpoena the Clinton email hard drives or otherwise assure their safekeeping.

On Face the Nation yesterday Rep. Gowdy declared the existence of significant gaps in the Clinton email record to which he has been privy. Fans of Watergate will appreciate the reference to gaps and note that Gowdy’s gap exceeds 18 minutes by a fair margin. The hard drives, however, should allow for the gaps to be closed.

Via Washington Free Beacon.

UPDATE: Going to the Examiner site risks an assault, but it may be worth it to pick up Byron York’s pursuit of the subject in “Does Hillary email flap mean trouble ahead for the White House?”

THIS JUST IN: At today’s White House press conference, Obama spokesman Josh Earnest acknowledged that Clinton emailed Obama from her private email account, but suggested he was unaware of the arrangements. See video posted here.

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