Hillary Who? Jared Kushner Has Been Using His Private Email to Conduct White House Business

Lock her up!

No… wait. Lock him up!

So how does the Trump tribe feel about a new report that Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a bit of something in common with Trump’s former opponent/longtime pal, Hillary Clinton?

Politico reports that during the transition, Kushner set up a private email account and has used it to conduct official business with other members of the administration.

Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, according to four people familiar with the correspondence. POLITICO has seen and verified about two dozen emails.

Kushner’s lawyer insists that it’s not that many and it’s not that often.

“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday. “Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”

There’s no indication that Kushner is using his private email to exchange sensitive information, but he has discussed business with other White House officials, such as Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, Gary Cohn, and spokesman Josh Raffel. The word is he prefers phone calls or texts.

What’s more, he’s used the private server to talk to acquaintances outside of the White House about White House business.

Kushner’s wife, Ivanka Trump, also has a personal account on the private domain.

Private email traffic among White House aides — some of it sent between personal email accounts rather than to or from government addresses — could skirt the requirements of the Presidential Records Act, which requires all documents related to the president’s personal and political activities to be archived. Trump himself is not known to use email but occasionally has email messages to his assistant printed and presented to him.

And while they’re not exactly using BleachBit, Kushner and those he’s corresponding with did take precautions with their emails.

Other White House officials have also sometimes used personal accounts to correspond with Kushner and with each other, according to emails seen by POLITICO and people familiar with Kushner’s correspondence. They have also used encrypted apps like Signal and Confide that automatically delete messages, prompting former press secretary Sean Spicer in February to issue a warning to communications staffers that using such apps could violate the Presidential Records Act.

Besides Clinton’s troubles, an Obama-era attorney informed White House staff not to use personal email accounts to discuss government business.

Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University, has suggested that if Trump administration emails aren’t saved, it could make it difficult for historians to understand the workings of the administration.

“There’s a reason we require officials to keep those records,” said Zelizer. “Even if 80 percent of someone’s records are not interesting, the other 20 percent can be very illuminating on how an administration worked.”

I wouldn’t worry about those emails. You can always scan Twitter’s archives to understand this administration.

The post Hillary Who? Jared Kushner Has Been Using His Private Email to Conduct White House Business appeared first on RedState.