On Thursday, the White House tried to keep the lunch between U.S. President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton private, but a Tweet of a People Magazine reporter - later deleted, then re-posted on the same day -- made the meeting public and was later criticized.

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The "lunch" with Clinton was not part of the president's public schedule with a seeming intention to keep the meeting of the two as private as possible.

However, other reporters caught on with the meeting when a photo was posted on the official Twitter account of People Magazine.

The picture showed Sandra Sobieraj Westfall, People's Washington bureau chief, and the former Secretary of State standing close together with the tweet that goes, "PEOPLE's @sswestfall chats w/@HillaryClinton before her @WhiteHouse lunch. Hope she wasn't late for @barackobama!"

Other members of the White House press corps who were not in the know that a meeting was taking place caught what was going on when they saw the photo on the magazine's Twitter.

When members of the press started asking what the meeting was about and why it was not in the president's public schedule, People's Magazine deleted the tweet, but reposted it about an hour later.

Roll Call White House correspondent Steven Dennis filed a press pool report noted that an official from the White House confirmed the lunch.

The official said the President Obama enjoyed an "informal, private lunch" with the former Secretary of State that afternoon.

"The President enjoyed an informal, private lunch with Secretary Clinton at the White House this afternoon," a White House official said.

Dennis complained to Jay Carney, White House Press Secretary, for not being transparent about the meeting.

Speculations abound on what Obama and Clinton talked about over lunch. Some speculated the meeting could have been about talks on how to draw down forces in Afghanistan or it may have something to do with Clinton's second bid for the presidency next year.

Perhaps the biggest criticism of all about the "informal, private" lunch is the controversy regarding the report released by the Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General. The report stated that 1,700 veterans at a VA hospital located in Phoenix, Arizona, were placed systematically on a secret waiting list and were allowed to languish while waiting for VA doctors to check them up.

The report also said that of the 1,700 veterans on the secret list, 40 have already died.

The president has not yet addressed the findings of the report publicly. He is being criticized for not finding the time of day to look into the matter, but has time with a secret meeting with Clinton.

TagsBarack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Meeting, Lunch, White House press corps, transparency