By Jeff Mason and Roberta Rampton
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton exchanged emails during her time as secretary of state, the White House said on Monday, confirming the president was aware that his potential successor used a private email address for government work.
Obama said in an interview with CBS on Saturday that he found out about Clinton's use of a personal email account through recent news reports, but White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama was aware of her address earlier.
"The president, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office trade emails with his secretary of state," Earnest told reporters.
"The point that the president was making is not that he didn't know Secretary Clinton's email address. He did. But he was not aware of the details of how that email address and that server had been set up, or how Secretary Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act."
The email issue has upset what has been seen otherwise as a smooth pathway toward the Democratic Party's 2016 presidential nomination for Clinton, a former U.S. senator and first lady.
While interpretations about any rule violations have varied, the scandal has sparked Republican claims that she was trying to avoid transparency and could have posed a security threat.
It has also complicated the relationship between Obama's White House and the Clinton team. Obama and his staff have tried to walk a careful line between noting his administration's recommendations that officials use government email accounts without suggesting that Clinton had done anything wrong.
Even though Clinton left the State Department in 2013, she only turned over emails from her time as secretary last year. The records were hosted on a private server registered to Clinton's home rather than a government system.
State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Monday that the emails Clinton had submitted were being stored in "several boxes" and spanned her time as the nation's top diplomat.
The Republican National Committee accused the president of misleading the public about his knowledge of the account.
"The president did in fact exchange emails with Hillary Clinton via her ‘homebrew' account," said RNC spokesman Michael Short. "That makes his claim that he learned about it from news reports misleading at best."
Politico reported that Clinton would likely address the issue in the next several days at a press conference in New York. A Clinton spokesman did not return a request for comment.