THREE MARTINI LUNCH: MARCH 9, 2015

National Review's Jim Geraghty and Radio America's Greg Corombos discuss current events. Today's Martinis: Few Democrats are willing to defend Hillary Clinton over the growing e-mail scandal, Russian animosity towards the U.S. reaches record levels, and California college students vote to ban the American flag.



White House: Why yes, Obama did know Hillary Clinton's private e-mail address...and they did e-mail each other

Via the Standard, didn't Obama tell CBS that he found out about Hillary's private e-mail the same way he finds out about every government scandal, by reading the newspaper? How do you square that statement with this statement by Earnest?

The spin, I guess, will be that O didn't know the extent of Hillary's private e-mailing and simply assumed, wrongly as it turned out, that she was doing most of her e-mailing with others from an official State Department e-mail account. It's not against State Department policy to use private e-mail occasionally so long as you promptly copy any correspondence to your official account - which Hillary didn't have - so that the archives pick it up.

If Obama exchanged, say, six messages with her over the course of four years, he might have noticed the private address each time but failed to notice that she was using a private address every time. In theory.

But even that spin has a big problem.

Yep. POTUS and SecState traded completely unsecure emails. http://t.co/RZxaGlcDUZ
— Daniel Foster (@DanFosterType) March 9, 2015

Bad news: If foreign hackers have Hillary's emails (they do), they also have the President's email address since Obama corresponded w/ her.
— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) March 9, 2015

Given how pitiful the security was for Hillary's private server, it's a cinch that hackers have Obama's address now (if they didn't already). It's also a cinch that they have copies of any e-mails the two exchanged. Unless they were trading mindless pleasantries on the order of "congrats on the grandchild!", it's unfathomable to me that Obama would have discussed anything in writing with a cabinet member through a private account whose security was a question mark to him.

You would think that lesson one on day one for a new president on how to use e-mail responsibly is to never correspond with a private account - ever. As it is, State still won't say definitively, on the record, that Hillary's homebrew server was secure.

Question one, then: How many e-mails did they exchange? Five? Fifty? If it was just one a week for four years, the number will run into the hundreds. Earnest says it was a small number but he doesn't get specific. Time to get specific, since the greater the number is, the harder it'll be to believe that O didn't realize she was using private e-mail exclusively.

Question two: Who told Obama it was a good idea, or at least not a bad idea, to e-mail someone's private account? Has he been e-mailing other private accounts since 2009? How sure is he that every one of those private accounts is actually being used by the person he thinks is using it?

Also read:

FNC's Chris Wallace to Lanny Davis: Do you ever get tired of cleaning up Clinton messes?

Carville to MSNBC: Let's face it, you and the NY Times are in the tank for the right on this Clinton e-mail thing!