The day after we found out Jared Kushner set up a private email account during the presidential transition in December and then used that personal account to conduct official government business well into the Trump presidency, we now discover a handful of other senior members of the Trump administration have also been using personal email accounts on the job. The New York Times reported Monday that, in addition to Kushner, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Stephen Miller, and Gary D. Cohn have, to differing degrees, all used personal accounts while working in the White House. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump also reportedly used a personal email address while an unpaid adviser in the first months of the administration.
In Kushner’s case, it looks awfully similar to Hillary Clinton’s email setup. From the Times:
Most of Mr. Trump’s aides used popular commercial email services like Gmail. Mr. Kushner created a domain, IJKFamily.com, in December to host his family’s personal email. That domain was hosted by GoDaddy on a server in Arizona, records show.
“Officials are supposed to use government emails for their official duties so their conversations are available to the public and those conducting oversight,” the Times notes. “But it is not illegal for White House officials to use private email accounts as long as they forward work-related messages to their work accounts so they can be preserved.” But that’s not really the point, is it. The point is the stunning hypocrisy emanating out of a White House that quite literally called for the jailing of Hillary Clinton during the campaign for her email usage while at the State Department. Trump’s supporters frothed at the mouth shouting “lock her up” during campaign rallies because Clinton used a personal email account for official government business. If you want to nitpick that a handful of the tens of thousands of emails Hillary Clinton sent or received had sensitive material, let’s hold on until we get to see all of these guys’ emails. Rarely has a group of presidential advisers shown such wanton disregard for the bounds of legality—on all fronts.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller has the ability to subpoena emails from private companies’ servers, like Google or Yahoo.
