Donald Trump continues to lead his devoted followers in chants of “Lock her up!” at his rallies, because Hillary Clinton famously used private email for government business while she was secretary of state. So of course, we now find out that Ivanka Trump has been using a personal email account for government business. Ivanka used a Microsoft email account to communicate with Cabinet officials, White House aides, and others.
And it isn’t just Ivanka of course. The people in the Trump administration who have also used private email for government business include her father, the president, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn, and Stephen Miller.
My favorite part is that the White House responded by pointing out that, as opposed to Hillary Clinton, Ivanka Trump never set up a private server. However, breaking into a public email server is far easier than breaking into a private server.
4 Comments
Whether to use private email services by email vendor, or use private email on personal email server, both letter of laws and intent matter.
Sec Collin Powell used private emails but was when letter of law was not explicit/in formation, and it is pretty clear that he did not have such intention to hide it as he cced his governmet account as well.
With Hillary and Ivanka, letter of law is clear, and both violated that. As far as intent, for Ivanka, we have to find that out, as using email from a common email services may not be best way of hiding email for transparency. With Hillary Clinton, the intent was clear by use of private server that she did not want anyone to ever get access to it (not hacking, but rather transparency).
Actually, by using a private server, Clinton’s emails were retained. But using a public server like Microsoft’s email, once you delete something, it is gone and cannot be recovered. So the opposite of what you claim is true.
See https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2018/Senate/Maps/Nov20.html#item-1 for more information.
IK, I read electoral-vote daily. And I disagree. Yes, if someone does not “wipe out” private server then ofcourse it is easy to have access to it and recover everything. And for micrososoft email, it depends, as even deleted emails are in the trash folder (most users may not even clean it) and it retains for good period of time. Storage is not cheap, so I can understand if someone empties trash, then microsoft or any email service just deletes it permanently (either immediately or nightly batch jobs).
And again, it is about intent. If Ivanka used private email service to hide some thing (btw there are enough dirt in public on Trumps that this seems rather miniscule than rest of corruption), then whether she was successful or not in purgin old emails are irrelevant. Similarly, Hillary Clinton, not being tech savy, did what she thought would not expose her emails, but ofcourse if she did not clean her private server properly beyond any forensic recovery, that does not mean she had no intent of hiding stuff.
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