Remember when George W. Bush "lost" 22 million emails that were hosted on a private server at the RNC?
Yeah, me too.
And then remember how horrible and awful it was that Hillary Clinton had an outside server for her personal email and it was the topic of the "Lock Her Up!" chant at all of Trump's rallies?
Yeah, me too.
Now Newsweek reports that much of the top-level White House staff has outside email accounts hosted at the RNC. I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you!
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.
Is Judicial Watch on the job? Are they submitting FOIA requests right now to obtain all of those emails? Will they be publishing them in redacted tranches over the next four years?
Well, WILL THEY?
Here's the crowd at the Republican National Convention shouting "Lock her up!" You think we'll hear it from them in 4 years when these staffers' emails land on Wikileaks? Doubtful.
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