After endlessly attacking former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and calling for her to be “locked up” over her using a private server while she was Secretary of State, Newsweek has just reported that Senior Trump administration staffers are now doing the same thing.
Breaking: Trump White House senior staff have private RNC email accounts https://t.co/p2JdXeteDE pic.twitter.com/IsfDXUGGcL
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) January 25, 2017
These staffers include Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Sean Spicer, and Steve Bannon. It was discovered that they all have active accounts on a Republican National Committee email system, separate from the White House servers.
The Legality Of Private Servers
It should be said that having separate political email accounts at the White House is not illegal. However, this new administration is certainly capable of repeating the same mistake that sunk the Democrat’s presidential campaign. As former Bush administration lawyer Richard Painter states:
“They better be careful after making such a huge ruckus over the private email server over at the State Department.”
It is not yet clear how President Donald Trump’s staff is using the RNC email addresses. If they are, then any use of these accounts is subject to an unnecessarily long-winded 2014 law known as “Disclosure Requirement For Official Business Conducted Using Electronic Messaging Accounts.” Under this law, White House staffers who end up using RNC email for White House work must copy or forward those communications into the government system within 20 days.
RNC Servers ‘Lost’ 22 Million Emails Under George W. Bush
This law was passed to prevent administrations from hiding communications that fall under the Presidential Records Act of 1978. It is particularly noteworthy because the last time White House staffers used the RNC email system was during George W. Bush’s presidency. In 2007, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) Director Melanie Sloan charged that the Bush administration was using the RNC email system because:
“They don’t want anyone ever to be able to come back and see what was going on behind the scenes.”
This highly controversial email system was involved in the disappearance of roughly 22 million emails at that time. Disturbingly, these emails were all sent around the beginning of the Iraq War. Although the emails have since been found and given to the National Archives, they remain under national security shield and are not available to the public.
‘Lock Him Up’
Ignoring just the jaw-dropping hypocrisy of Trump and his team using a private email server, there are other issues with this email system. Given the ever-present Russian hacking threat, the RNC system is not an ideal holding place for government information. Furthermore, this mixture of email systems makes transparency even less easy to maintain, as exemplified by the Bush Administration.
I wonder what FBI Director James Comey thinks of this RNC email set up? Do you think he would also call this private server “extremely reckless,” or has he changed his mind now that the election is over? And does Trump even recognize his own hypocrisy? I doubt it, because although this might be his most hypocritical move yet, it is still one of many. I believe it is time to start a new movement specifically for this issue, it is time to “lock him up.”
Watch the video below to see Trump praising the FBI taking action over Clinton’s emails, I wonder if they’ll do the same for him?
Featured image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr/CC-By-2.0
