There’s usually only one reason government officials use personal email accounts: to dodge FOIA requests. The excuses offered by those caught doing it are never credible. And those who do opt for personal email — especially at the federal level — are putting themselves in peril. There are also practical security reasons for using government email addresses.
A lot of Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign focused on his opponent’s use of a personal email server to handle official State Department business. The FBI even looked into this before deciding (twice!) Hillary Clinton’s personal email server was careless and stupid, but probably not criminal.
When Trump first took office, he shamelessly did the same thing. Many members of his staff continued to use personal email addresses to conduct government business, both increasing their chances of being compromised by foreign hackers and decreasing the chances that the public could gain access to these communications via FOIA requests.
The trend continues with Trump’s second term. No lessons have been learned during his four years away from the office of president. Or, perhaps, the only lessons Trump and his team desired to learn — that using private email is a pretty good opacity option — have been taken to heart.
Unfortunately for those having to (also unfortunately) welcome him back to office, he and his team’s insistence on using personal email accounts has created security risks that can’t be mitigated without pretty much forgoing electronic communications altogether, as Alice Ollstein reports for Politico:
Federal officials say they’re worried about sharing documents via email with Donald Trump’s transition team because the incoming officials are eschewing government devices, email addresses and cybersecurity support, raising fears that they could potentially expose sensitive government data.
The private emails have agency employees considering insisting on in-person meetings and document exchanges that they otherwise would have conducted electronically, according to two federal officials granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Their anxiety is particularly high in light of recent hacking attempts from China and Iran that targeted Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and other top officials.
If nothing else, this is going to slow down the transition. But more than that, it shows Trump and his hand-picked team are still unwilling to abide by the normal transfer-of-power flow that had pretty much gone uninterrupted until Donald Trump refused to accept the results of the previous election.
Granted, Trump is not officially president yet and his staffers are not yet official government employees. But for the sake of the nation, it would make sense to operate within the normally accepted confines, if for no other reason than doing so decreases the attack surface that can be exploited by hostile nations and their state-sanctioned hacking attempts.
Proving yet again he only cares about anti-Biden optics and maintaining as much direct control of his sycophants, Trump and his team have decided to handle this transition by utilizing an all-you-can-eat buffet of easily-compromised accounts and devices.
Trump — who attacked his then-opponent Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for official business during his first presidential run — is overseeing a fully privatized transition that communicates from an array of @transition47.com, @trumpvancetransition.com and @djtfp24.com accounts rather than anything ending in .gov, and uses private servers, laptops and cell phones instead of government-issued devices.
All hail the returning Commander-in-Chief, a man so self-absorbed he’s willing to threaten the security of the nation during his transition back into public office. Not that any of this will matter to him, his team, or his millions of supporters. If nothing else, they’ll present this as another form of “owning the libs” and nail themselves to the nearest cross the moment malicious hackers access anything they’ve deliberately left unprotected. It’s win-win for Trump. But it’s an undeniable loss for the nation and an insult to the long-held expectation that people assuming the office of Leader of the Free World will act respectfully and responsibly when being handed this exorbitant amount of power.
