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Federal officials have spent years establishing and improving presidential transition processes, including making key resources available to incoming presidents and their teams. For example, as Donald Trump prepares to return the White House, he and his transition operation have been offered official government communications accounts — including .gov email addresses — to conduct official business.
Politico reported, however, that the Republican president-elect and his team are “overseeing a fully privatized” operation, which is relying on “private servers, laptops and cell phones instead of government-issued devices.”
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.
The Trump transition confirmed its use of private emails, with spokesperson Brian Hughes telling Politico that “all transition business is conducted on a transition-managed email server.” The outlet reported:
“We have implemented plans to communicate information securely as necessary,” [Hughes] added, but declined to say what those plans entail. In a statement in late November, transition co-chair Susie Wiles similarly cited unspecified “security and information protections” the team has in place, arguing that they replace the need for “additional government and bureaucratic oversight.”
Michael Daniel, a former White House cyber coordinator who now leads the nonprofit online security organization Cyber Threat Alliance, told Politico, “I can assure you that the transition teams are targets for foreign intelligence collection. There are a lot of countries out there that want to know: What are the policy plans for the incoming administration?”
You probably know what I’m going to write next. I’m going to write it anyway.
Younger readers might not fully appreciate the degree to which the 2016 presidential election focused on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s email protocols. Voters were told in no uncertain terms that this was one of the defining political issues of our time.
As Election Day 2016 approached, and the United States faced the prospect of having a television personality elected to the nation’s highest office, “email” was the one thing voters heard most about the more capable and more qualified candidate.
The fact that Clinton did not rely entirely on her state.gov address, the electorate was told, was evidence of her recklessness. She put the United States at risk, the argument went, by mishandling classified materials. For some, it might even have been literally criminal — culminating in “Lock her up” chants at Trump rallies.
During the presidential campaign, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan went so far as to formally request that Clinton be denied intelligence briefings — insisting that her email practices were proof that she mishandled classified information and therefore couldn’t be trusted.
When various observers — including me — said this was an outrageously foolish controversy, we received pushback from those who argued with great sincerity that this deserved to be an issue that dictated the outcome of one of the most important national elections in modern history.
Clinton, of course, narrowly lost to Trump, who was later credibly accused by federal prosecutors of improperly taking classified materials to his glorified country club in Florida, before relying on the kind of private email servers that sparked anti-Clinton hysteria eight years ago.
My point is not that Republicans have flip-flopped on the issue. Rather, the Trump-related developments serve as an example of insincerity.
It’s not that Trump and his party have changed their minds about the importance of email security and the hazards associated with eschewing official government accounts. The truth is simpler: They never actually cared about Clinton’s tech practices in the first place.
It was simply a convenient line of attack, which has since outlived its usefulness.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.