President Barack Obama says he learned from news reports that his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, had used a personal email account for official business.
"I am glad that Hillary has instructed that those emails about official business need to be disclosed," Obama said, according to an excerpt from an interview with CBS News, released Saturday.
Clinton is widely expected to win the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2016, even though she has not officially announced that she will run.
Controversy arose when it was discovered that Clinton used a private email account for official business while serving as secretary of state. State Department officials have said that using a private email account was not prohibited and that Clinton never shared classified information via the account. But critics said the private account might have been set up to give her a way to hide her communications.
Clinton has said that she wants the public to see her emails and that she asked the State Department to release them. Officials have said the process of reviewing thousands of emails has begun but will take months.
Clinton broke her silence on the matter in a Twitter message Wednesday after her use of the personal email account was revealed by The New York Times, which added that she may have violated federal records laws that require archiving official government documents.
The story took on an added dimension when a report published by The Associated Press said Clinton had used a personal email server based in her family's home in New York.
The revelations prompted the chairman of the special House of Representatives committee investigating the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, to subpoena Clinton's emails related to the incident.
