According to a report from Newsweek, several members of Donald Trump‘s newly minted administration will be using private Republican National Committee email accounts during the White House tenure.
According to Newsweek’s Nina Burleigh, the revelation is an issue because the RNC email system “was hacked during the 2016 race.”
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.
… 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.
Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon are among the Trump administration officials who have RNC email accounts.
“They better be careful after making such a huge ruckus over the private email over at the State Department,” former Bush administration ethics attorney Richard Painter said to Newsweek.
It isn’t illegal for White House officials to use RNC email accounts, but they are not allowed to use them to conduct government business without proper disclosure.
“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,” Burleigh writes. “The Disclosure Requirement was passed to prevent presidents from shielding communications that fall under the Presidential Records Act of 1978.”
In addition to the Newsweek report, The New York Times says that President Trump is still using his unsecured Android phone to tweet from the White House.
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