U.S. President Barack Obama emailed Hillary Clinton at her personal email address during her time as U.S. Secretary of State, and only recently learned that Clinton had set up her own email server, the White House said on Monday.

"The president, as I think many people expected, did over the course of his first several years in office, trade emails with the Secretary of State," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at the daily briefing.

In an interview with U.S. TV network CBS aired Sunday, Obama said he learned of Clinton using her private email instead of the State Department email to conduct business during her tenure only through news reports.

"That maybe one conclusion to draw from the president's remarks, but it would not be an accurate one," said Earnest, stressing that Obama meant to say he was not aware of Clinton's own email server and how Clinton and her team were planning to comply with the Federal Records Act.

"But what is clear is that as president said in his interview, the emails that he sent are properly maintained, consistent with the Presidential Records Act," Earnest said.

U.S. news outlets revealed last week that Clinton did not use an official email address while taking the helm at the U.S. State Department. Instead, she dealt with daily business on a private account exclusively. The Clinton team also set up her own email server to fully control who could have the access to those emails.

The exposure of Clinton closely guarding her emails posed not only a public relations crisis for a promising Democratic presidential candidate for 2016 elections, but a possible legal investigation into whether her practice had broken laws.

Clinton has already turned over 55,000 pages of emails to the State Department and in her first response on Wednesday, she tweeted that she wanted the public to see her emails, hours after a U.S. House investigation committee into the Benghazi incident issued subpoenas to the State Department for all Clinton emails related to Libya.

Meanwhile, Top House Republican Benghazi investigator Trey Gowdy said on Sunday that the emails Clinton had handed over for reviews have "huge gaps" that lasted for months.

According to U.S. TV network CNN, Clinton was expected to hold a press conference in New York in coming days to address the issue. Endi

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