Kushner’s Use Of Private Email, WhatsApp Highlights Trump Admin Hypocrisy
President Donald Trump speaks with White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner as he departs after a Hanukkah reception in the East Room of the White House, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2017, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
The candidate who waged his presidential campaign against Hillary Clinton’s use of private email has run an administration full of individuals that have done exactly that. According to House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-MD), President Trump’s son-in-law and White House Adviser, Jared Kushner, has been relying on his private email account and the encrypted messaging app WhatsApp for government business. In a letter to the White House, Rep. Cummings alleged that Jared Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell told his committee about this conduct in December but was unsure if classified info was discussed by Kushner. Lowell is now claiming he is being misquoted.
Jared Kushner has reportedly used WhatsApp to communicate with foreign nationals, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is responsible for the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Rep. Cummings wrote: “These communications raise questions about whether these officials complied with the Presidential Records Act…” Cummings is also requesting information from the White House about alleged private email use on the part of Ivanka Trump, former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, and former Chief Strategist Steve Bannon. The Washington Post previously reported Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails on her private account in 2017.
This comes after reports revealed then-Chief of Staff John Kelly and White House Counsel Don McGahn recommended that Ivanka not be granted a security clearance, but Trump pressured them to grant her one anyway. President Trump also reportedly ordered Kelly to grant Kushner’s security clearance despite the concerns of McGahn and the CIA. When they didn’t follow his demands, he reportedly granted them himself. Kushner had several problematic conflicts of interest due to his ties to foreign nationals and had to update his SF-86 several times with over 100 foreign contacts.
These aren’t the first potential breaches of security on the part of the Trump administration. President Trump himself has reportedly had his personal iPhone calls spied on by Russia and China. President Trump also revealed classified information about ISIS to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office the day after he fired FBI Director James Comey.
Donald Trump ran a campaign that heavily featured messaging that attacked Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information and called for her to be locked up for it. It’s important to note that Clinton’s email server was never hacked, and it was just the potential for a breach that was at issue. In the case of President Trump, his administration has jeopardized classified information on multiple occasions and there have been no calls to lock him up from his base.
@nytimes: Bannon, Ivanka, Kushner, Miller, Cohn, & Priebus all used private emails
2016 Trump on Clinton emails: “She should be in jail”
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