Politics Hundreds of White House emails sent to third Kushner family account

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/10/02/jared-kushner-email-account-white-house-243389

 

Emails sent from white house accounts are recorded and saved by the government, so nothing too wrong about it, legally.

The optics are bad because of what Clinton did, but there is a huge difference. Clinton exclusively used a server out of the sight and control and protection of government agencies responsible for those things. The Trump officials use government servers and accounts for government business. They're also clearly making best effort to obey the Records Act, which Clinton did not do.

I can see it is reasonable to forward your travel itinerary to a personal account so you can access it on the road. If you have to access it from government servers, you'd have to go to a secure location and use secure machines. Hard to do that if you're in line at the airport.

At the very least, they should provide full disclosure of every email on these servers for public scrutiny.

It would be important to know they're not conducting Trump business (like Clinton did with her "charity"), or doing quid pro quo favors (as Clinton did).

Another difference is Clinton was a career politician and a lawyer. She had to know better. You can't say the same about Trump or his family.

 

Another thing raised in the article is the security issue. I seriously doubt the government servers are any more safe than Google's mail service. The NSA was hacked. How bad is that? Google (and the other top mail services) hire elite security professionals to watch over it all.

The article talks about Kushner setting up a domain, which is not the same thing as a server in a basement. A domain can be managed by Google or the other email services.

 

7 legal experts asked by left wing site Vox.com about the legality. The answer is roughly the same for all 7, though several mentioned the hypocrisy (as did I).

https://www.vox.com/2017/10/3/16384126/trump-white-house-private-email-kushner-bannon

Eric Columbus, former official at Department of Justice (2009-’14) and Department of Homeland Security (2014-’17)

It’s not illegal for White House staffers to use private email to discuss official unclassified matters as long as they send a copy of the email to their official accounts within 20 days. The specific time limit is mandated by the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, codified at 44 USC 2209. Notably, this law applies to texts as well, so any staffer who texted about official matters from a private phone but didn’t forward the text to his or her official account within 20 days has violated the law. This isn't a crime, but the law provides that intentional violations “shall be a basis for disciplinary action.”

Incidentally, a different portion of the same law extends this requirement to federal agency officers and employees. But because the law wasn’t passed until after Hillary Clinton had left government, we didn’t hear much about it during the presidential campaign.

 

And from the OP:

Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell said his client “uses his White House email address to conduct White House business” and that Kushner exchanged fewer than 100 emails with White House colleagues through the personal account. In most cases, those exchanges were initiated by the other party sending a message to Kushner’s private account, Lowell said.

Kushner forwarded such messages to his official White House email account to comply with the Presidential Records Act, which mandates that documents about White House activities be preserved, according to Lowell.