White House Senior Adviser Caught Using Private Email Server

Attorneys for Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, admitted on Sunday that he had used a private email to communicate with White House staffers since joining joining the administration in January.

Politico first reported the existence of Kushner’s private server and his lawyers later confirmed that he had sent “fewer than 100” emails from the account. Kushner, who has also used the encrypted messaging app Signal while working at the White House, apparently had the family’s private domain set up last December. His wife Ivanka Trump, a special assistant to the president, has an account through the private server but Politico was unable to verify if she had also used the email to conduct government business.

One of Kushner’s lawyers, Abbe Lowell, maintained that his client did not send classified information using his private email. “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,” Lowell told Politico. “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.”

Lowell contended that Kushner had not violated the Presidential Records Act, which requires all communication between White House staff to be archived, as he had forwarded all correspondence from his private server to his government email.

Fancy that! A senior White House staffer was caught using private email server to conduct official White House business. I just can’t imagine how Trump would react if, say, the former Secretary of State happened to do the same thing. Oh wait.

Now that Kushner’s use of private email server is out in the open, will we start hearing chants of “lock him up” at future Trump rallies? I somehow doubt that, but the Twitter president will surely find a way to differentiate Kushner’s use of a private email from Hillary Clinton’s. As of July, Trump was very much committed to investigating her use of a private server — and publicly expressed his disappointment in Attorney General Jeff Sessions for not doing so. My guess is he doesn’t feel the same way about his son-in-law.