Did the FBI admit that President Barack Obama lied to the nation about Hillary Clinton's email? No, that's not true: The article making the claim misrepresents a Judicial Watch report that an FBI official disclosed in a deposition that one of the sources for recovered Clinton emails was the server for the Executive Office of the President. The official did not "admit" that Obama lied about it or that he knew what server Clinton's emails were sent from before learning about it in media reports.
The false story originated from an article published on April 24, 2019 titled "FBI Admits Barack Obama Told Bare-Faced Lie To Nation About Hillary's Emails" (archived here) which opened:
Barack Obama told a bare-faced lie to the nation when he claimed he had no idea Hillary Clinton was using a private email system for her official correspondence while secretary of state, according to new revelations by a senior FBI official.
Thanks to Judicial Watch, the non-governmental organization of American lawyers who are hellbent at getting to the truth, we now can prove Barack Obama knew about Hillary Clinton's allegedly illegal home server.
According to the senior FBI official, who testified under oath, the FBI searched the White House and literally finally found Hillary's emails records in the Barack Obama Oval Office.
Users on social media only saw this title, description and thumbnail:
FBI Admits Barack Obama Told Bare-Faced Lie To Nation About Hillary's Emails
It is time to hold the former administration's feet to the fire
News Punch makes a huge leap, concluding that since emails from then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were received and archived by a government email server used by the president and his staff that President Obama would then have knowledge that they passed through a private server in Clinton's home.
In other words, ol' Barack left evidence of Hillary's emails right in the Oval Office, then he had the cojones to tell yet another bare-faced lie to the nation when he claimed he didn't know she had a home server or was using a private email server for official correspondence.
The mistruth that Obama allegedly told would have happened in a CBS News interview in March 2015 when reporter Bill Plante asked the president when he first learned that Clinton used an email system outside the U.S. government for official business when she was secretary of state. Obama answered "The same time everybody else learned it through news reports." View that part of the interview here:
Obama did not say if he ever noticed her emails were sent from a Clintonemail.com address and not the official state.gov address.
The Judicial Watch report news release can be read here. It opened:
Judicial Watch announced today that a senior FBI official admitted, in writing and under oath, that the agency found Clinton email records in the Obama White House, specifically, the Executive Office of the President. The FBI also admitted nearly 49,000 Clinton server emails were reviewed as result of a search warrant for her material on the laptop of Anthony Weiner.
E.W. (Bill) Priestap, assistant director of the FBI Counterintelligence Division, made the disclosure to Judicial Watch as part of court-ordered discovery into the Clinton email issue.
The FBI official was being question about the agency's effort to recover emails that may have been deleted from Clinton's private server. He was listing the sources of recovered emails.
NewsPunch (formerly YourNewsWire) has published several hoaxes and fake news articles in the past so anything they write or publish should be taken with a large grain of salt. Their Facebook page "The People's Voice" even lost its verification checkmark according to a report from MMFA.
The Terms of Use of the site (archived here, still referencing YourNewsWire) also make it clear they don't really stand behind the accuracy of any of their reporting:
THE PEOPLE'S VOICE, INC. AND/OR ITS SUPPLIERS MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS ABOUT THE SUITABILITY, RELIABILITY, AVAILABILITY, TIMELINESS, AND ACCURACY OF THE INFORMATION, SOFTWARE, PRODUCTS, SERVICES AND RELATED GRAPHICS CONTAINED ON THE SITE FOR ANY PURPOSE.
The site was profiled in the Hollywood reporter where it was described as:
Your News Wire, a 3-year-old website of murky facts and slippery spin, is published by Sean Adl-Tabatabai and Sinclair Treadway -- a Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016 -- out of an apartment in L.A.'s historic El Royale.
RationalWiki described it as:
YourNewsWire (styled as YourNewsWire.com[1]) is an Los Angeles-based clickbait fake news website known for disseminating conspiracy theories and misleading information, contrary to its claimed motto ("News. Truth. Unfiltered").[1]
A while ago we reported that YourNewsWire had rebranded itself as NewsPunch by changing its domain name in an apparent effort to evade filtering/blocking.
We wrote about newspunch.com before, here are our most recent articles that mention the site:
- Fake News: Over 30,000 Scientists Did NOT Declare Climate Change A Hoax
- Fake News: Democrats DID NOT Say Americans Must Pay Reparations to Illegal Aliens
- Fake News: Pope Francis Did NOT Compare Christians To Fungus
- Fake News: Firefighters DID NOT Suffer Neurological Damage After Contact With 5G Cell Towers
- Fake News: Putin Did NOT Ban Microsoft Products From Russia
