Senior Trump administration staffers including Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon have active accounts on a Republican National Committee email system, Newsweek has learned.
The system (rnchq.org) is the same one the George W. Bush administration was accused of using to evade transparency rules after claiming to have “lost” 22 million emails.
Making use of separate political email accounts at the White House is not illegal. In fact, they serve a purpose by allowing staff to divide political conversations (say, arranging for the president to support a congressional re-election campaign) from actual White House work. Commingling politics and state business violates the Hatch Act, which restricts many executive branch employees from engaging in political activity on government time.
But after then-candidate Donald Trump and the Republicans repeatedly called for “locking up” Hillary Clinton for handling government work with a private server while secretary of state, the new White House staff risks repeating the same mistake that dogged the Democrat’s presidential campaign. They also face a security challenge: The RNC email system, according to U.S. intelligence, was hacked during the 2016 race. “They better be careful after making such a huge ruckus over the private email over at the State Department,” says former Bush administration lawyer Richard Painter.
(The White House has not responded to queries about the system. Newsweek will update if and when it does.)
It’s not clear whether or how Trump staffers are using the RNC email addresses. If they are using them, they are subject to the “Disclosure Requirement For Official Business Conducted Using Electronic Messaging Accounts," a law, 44 U.S.C. 2209, that went into effect in 2014. If White House staffers have already used the RNC emails system for White House work, they must copy or forward those communications into the government system within 20 days.
The Disclosure Requirement was passed to prevent presidents from shielding communications that fall under the Presidential Records Act of 1978. The last time White House staffers used the same RNC email system, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) described it as an attempt to circumvent transparency. CREW Director Melanie Sloan charged in 2007 that the Bush White House 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.”
And the Bush email mess in 2007 was pretty huge, with 22 million emails that, you know, vanished into thin air never to be seen again. Now the Trump regime is happy to start getting away with doing that all over again.
Oh, and The Donald is still using an unsecured Android phone these days.
I'm sure it's not a problem, I mean Russia already knows 100% of what Trump is doing, so it doesn't really matter if they've got a bead on the thing 24/7 right?
Good thing we didn't elect the lady with the private email system.
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Funny, how all the people who were so butch about "Hillary for Prison" over 'those damned emails' have suddenly fallen lipstick when the Trumpsters do it.
Funny, as well, how the Trumpsters don't even pretend to try to follow the law. No slyme machine will lay a shit encrusted glove on them, and they know it.
Not funny at all is how the Federal Government has quite specific regulations concerning archives of communications related to official business, and the Trumpsters act as if they are not even aware of the existence of those regulations - which do indeed carry the force of law.
In short, not in office one single week and already the lawlessness runs rampant. True lawlessness, not the propaganda machine pabulum created for the befuddlement of the willfully stupid.
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