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 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.
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.”
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Besides the unfortunate P.R. optics of Trump using a nonofficial email server in his White House after a campaign built on attacking a similar practice, there are other, more serious problems. First, obviously, is cybersecurity. Russian hackers didn’t harvest as much material from the RNC system as from the Democrats’, but the system was still hackable. Second is transparency. Trump and other Republicans throughout the 2016 campaign voiced concerns about the transparency of Clinton’s use of a “home-brew” personal email server in her basement. FBI Director James Comey called her email practices “extremely reckless,” and the investigation and lingering taint of suspicion arguably cost her the election.
The chief effect of using the RNC server in the Bush years was to leave investigators who wanted to know more about the origins of the Iraq War in the dark—for years. It remains impossible to determine whether Bush staffers ever sent classified material over the RNC system.
