POLITICS

White House Aims to Stop Release of Obama-Clinton Emails

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDTOCT. 30, 2015

Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke at Clark Atlanta University on Friday. White House officials said emails between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama would become public many years after his presidency ends. CreditKevin D. Liles for The New York Times

WASHINGTON — The White House will try to block the release of a handful of emails between President Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, citing longstanding precedent invoked by presidents of both parties to keep presidential communications confidential, officials said Friday.

The State Department discovered the emails between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton as part of its effort to release the former secretary’s emails, several thousand more of which were made public on Friday. A review of those emails showed Mrs. Clinton engaged in conversations with various aides about security in Libya, discussing talking points after the 2012 attack on the American compound in Benghazi, Libya, and — on a lighter note — complaining about the lack of emoticons on her phone.

Mr. Obama’s direct correspondence with Mrs. Clinton was forwarded by the State Department to the White House, which has decided against release, a move likely to intensify the struggle between Mrs. Clinton and congressional Republicans, who have pressed for disclosure of her emails as part of an investigation into the administration’s handling of the Benghazi events.

The contents of the emails between Mrs. Clinton, who is running for president, and Mr. Obama have not been disclosed, but their presumed existence has not been a secret. The White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, acknowledged in March that the two “did have the occasion to email one another” when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state.

Mr. Obama told CBS News in March that he learned about Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server “the same time everybody else learned it — through news reports.” Mr. Earnest later clarified that the president was aware that she sometimes used a private email address but did not know the details about how the server was set up.

White House officials said Friday that their refusal to release the emails between the two officials is not based on their content, but rather is intended to defend the principle that presidents must be free to receive advice from their top aides without fear that the conversations will be made public during their time in office. They noted the emails between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton will eventually become public many years after the Obama presidency ends, under the terms of federal records laws.

“There is a long history of presidential records being kept confidential while the president is in office,” a White House official said. “It is a principle that previous White Houses have vigorously defended as it goes to the core of the president’s ability to receive unvarnished advice and counsel.”

White House officials said they were not asserting executive privilege, a specific legal authority that Mr. Obama has used only once, in the case of congressional inquiries into the “Fast and Furious” gunrunning operation, in which weapons ended up in the possession of Mexican gun cartels. Presidents often seek to avoid formally invoking executive privilege, which carries political overtones dating to President Richard M. Nixon’s assertion of the authority to block congressional investigations of the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s.

But by refusing to release the emails, Mr. Obama is following a well-worn precedent that he and his predecessors have established. Mr. Obama has repeatedly resisted efforts by Congress to turn over the president’s private communications, which by law are exempt from Freedom of Information laws that are often used to pry information out of other parts of an administration.

Former presidents of both parties have done the same, often insisting that to do otherwise would open the president’s most sensitive deliberations to congressional and public inspection.

“Direct communications by the president and his senior advisers are really at the very center of what is trying to be protected by executive privilege and the separation of powers,” said William Burck, a deputy counsel for President George W. Bush. He called the decision by Mr. Obama’s administration “very reasonable” and praised the president for following Mr. Bush’s practice.

The emails released on Friday show Mrs. Clinton received at least some indication that J. Christopher Stevens, the United States ambassador to Libya, was concerned about security in Benghazi more than a year before he was killed in the attack there.

An email sent to Mrs. Clinton in April 2011 said Mr. Stevens would meet with Libyan officials to “make a written request for better security at the hotel and for better security-related coordination.” How much Mrs. Clinton knew about the deteriorating situation in Benghazi was a focus of Republican questions at a congressional hearing this month.

One email a few days after the Benghazi attack shows Jake Sullivan, a top aide, telling Mrs. Clinton that Susan E. Rice, the United Nations ambassador, went on the Sunday talk shows and “did make clear our view that this started spontaneously and then evolved.” But a week later, after Ms. Rice spoke about a video prompting the attack, Mr. Sullivan wrote Mrs. Clinton that “you never said spontaneous or characterized the motives.”

The emails also highlighted how much advice Mrs. Clinton received from Sidney Blumenthal, a family friend who had been barred by the White House from working at the State Department. In one, Mr. Blumenthal suggests that Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist, had discovered that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, the leader of Libya, was in Chad.

“This sounds credible,” Mrs. Clinton wrote to one of her top aides. “Can we verify.”

Other emails suggest tensions between Mr. Obama’s top aides. Cheryl Mills, one of Mrs. Clinton’s top advisers, forwarded an email suggesting that White House officials were thinking of appointing a protocol chief of their own, superseding the State Department’s protocol chief. “I really dislike them,” she wrote to Mrs. Clinton.

In one email, an aide to Mrs. Clinton offers a lengthy and detailed description of a book about former President Bill Clinton, taking note of passages that mentioned Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom Mr. Clinton had an affair.

And in more than one email, Mrs. Clinton complained that her BlackBerry did not allow her to send emoticons. Emailing under the code name “Evergreen” in February 2012, she wrote that she was “quite bereft” at the lack of the tiny pictures. “Any way I can add them?” she asked. Two months later, she again sent a note to Philippe Reines, a top communications aide.

“On this new berry can I get smiley faces?” she wrote. Mr. Reines responded: “For email, no, I don’t think so — you need to type them out manually like :) for happy, or :-I I if you want to express anger at my tardiness.”

Correction: October 30, 2015

An earlier version of a picture caption accompanying this story gave an incorrect name for the university in Atlanta where Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke on Friday. It is called Clark Atlanta University, not Clark University.