But Their Emails!

I guess it's bad enough that Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner, seems to have done government business on private email.  (OMG! He's new at this people--are we supposed to believe he knew this was even a thing he shouldn't do...like as if there was a whole Presidential campaign where the biggest slight against one of the candidates was, um, private email use, or something?) And wouldn't you know it? It turns out a handful of other Trump Administration folks, some gone, like Steven Bannon and Reince Priebus, and some still there, like Stephen Miller and Gary Cohn, definitely seem to have used private email for government business too.

That's outstanding. (I'm leaving Ivanka Trump off the hook for her private email use for what might be considered WH business because she wasn't in the job yet, and I don't know that she recognized this as being a part of her job, even--but she probably did have a transition-team email at this point.)

What makes this email use a little more suspect to me, anyway, is that this was done with a very particular knowledge that use of private email would be considered suspect (again, that whole 2016 election thing) and that, because of little things like some Trump campaign and White House staff having had Russian connections that were revealed after they did things like not mention them in confirmation hearings or on security clearance applications...eh, that might look like they were going off state-comms for reasons.

The "for reasons" part being the same exact thing that exculpated Hillary Clinton from her long email debacle (except for the bit where it got opened up again in October of 2016). We just can't be as sure that Kushner and all them aren't using private emails for specific "reasons" (cough--Russia--cough).  As it is, the Trump Administration is playing a game of "follow the leader" in being too fond of their personal devices, and not nearly as careful of digital security as they ought to be. Combine that with the tendency of the Trump Admin to fail to fill key roles in security positions, and you have a recipe for a potential Trump Administration hacking crisis.

It looks bad, as I have been saying, because it is bad. They need to create some kind of on-the-job information technology security and ethics training for executive department use, if they haven't one already, or something. Because after all the news about emails--they really ought to, at the very least, know better.  Or at least, make like they do.