Day 791: Seven top Trump officials have pulled a ‘Hillary Clinton’: using private email accounts for official business
Trump, GOP are completely silent on the matter.
While campaigning, Donald Trump loved to stump on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server and account to conduct official business. A little more than two years into the job, he has at least seven members of his administration who have been implicated in — wait for it — using private email accounts to conduct official business, according to a House Oversight Committee probe.
On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump, both advisers to the president, had used either personal email accounts or the messaging application WhatsApp to conduct official business, according to information from the House Oversight Committee. The latter is particularly problematic because messages are encrypted between users, meaning that unless Kushner and Ivanka Trump stored copies of their messages or the recipients turned the messages over to the government, there’s no way to record what was said.
Kushner’s lawyer was unsure whether his client has shared classified materials over WhatsApp.
It wasn’t just Kushner and Ivanka Trump. The committee also learned that former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland and former adviser Stephen K. Bannon had also, at times, used personal email accounts for official business. Some of those communications, the Journal reports, dealt with a proposal to send nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia. McFarland’s account was through AOL, according to the New York Times.
Kushner, Trump, McFarland and Bannon join the previously-reported Stephen Miller, Reince Priebus and Gary Cohn in being implicated in using personal email accounts to conduct official business. These are all high-level individuals, with access to an array of information and documents.
Where’s the outcry from the GOP — and Donald Trump — now that it’s someone other than Hillary Clinton?
791 days in, 671 to go
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