Slashdot Mirror
Ivanka Trump Used Personal Account For Emails About Government Business (washingtonpost.com)
The Washington Post is reporting that Ivanka Trump used a personal email account to send hundreds of emails last year to White House aids, Cabinet officials and her assistants. Many of the emails were "in violation of federal records rules," the report says. Ivanka's practices are reminiscent of the personal email account Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state. From the report: White House ethics officials learned of Trump's repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner. Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump's personal emails -- and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. Trump said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction. A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump's attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, "acknowledged that the president's daughter occasionally used her private email before she was briefed on the rules, but he said none of her messages contained classified information," reports Washington Post.
"While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family," he said in a statement. He went on to say that her email use was different than that of Clinton. "Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no emails were ever deleted," Mirijanian said.
"While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family," he said in a statement. He went on to say that her email use was different than that of Clinton. "Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no emails were ever deleted," Mirijanian said.
Seems reasonable
Using personal email for work and vice-versa is something everybody does, even though it's often against some policy.
What matters is whether Classified information is being sent over unsecured links.
"Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, ..."
How is using the Trump Organization's server any better than using one in her own home or office? In fact, it is likely worse, because there will be more people with administrative access, simply because it is a bigger organization.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
False equivalence. The president's daughter sending emails with a personal account when she doesn't have any official position is not the same.
The Secretary of State systematically using her own server she had created for the purpose, willfully deleting 30,000 pieces of evidence, the FBI still finding 110 counts of felony mishandling, and getting away with it because "no reasonable prosecutor would risk their career by harming the Clintons" is not at all the same.
This is a tech news site. Everyone here should be acting in their best interests. There have been and currently are IT guys in prison for sending one email with classified information in the way Hillary did tens of thousands of times.
We really, really need to not let this one go. We are the ones that will and do pay in the end.
Ross Perot got pretty close, but by and large his party was eviscerated by the large chunk of his voters who preferred Bush Sr. and realized they caused Bill's election.
That's where the lesser of two evils doctrine in US elections got reiterated to the American public.
Ivanka is Trump's daughter who has an official government position. She should be subject to the same rules as other employees. The first lady is Melania Trump. That is another person entirely.
of the emails. What I care about is that my public officials are using private email servers to get around public records requests.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
As long as she used the one in her home, I guess it would be ok?
I mean, at least half of you MUST think that's ok (or you're hypocrites).
The other half must condemn her for this (or you're hypocrites too).
-Styopa
IIRC, during the campaign it came out that the Trump Org. server was a Win 2000 box. (Democrats argued that's how it was obvious they were the ones targeted, cause Trump's would have been trivial to hack.) Further, there is pretty ample evidence that both China and Russia have been pinging machines in Trump Tower at least since he announced.
So, it's probably far less secure, and probably already compromised.
There's also the factor that the record laws about email were at least new when Hiliary was SOS; Ivanka had a year and half lesson on it from her dad and every newspaper.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Ivanka is Trump's daughter who has an official government position. She should be subject to the same rules as other employees. The first lady is Melania Trump. That is another person entirely.
Once upon a time Hyprocrisy mattered, didn't it? I mean even when a republican does it?
Off the top of my head:
Trump and his iphone.
Trump with Russians in the Oval Office.
Omarosa recording a conversation in what was almost undoubtably a closed and secure area.
Ivaka using private email.
Hell Comey had some private email.
Trump not keeping up on his briefings, which is arguably worse than the Iphone thing. If there is one thing worse than an intelligence leak, is intelligence that should have lead to action that didn't.
Trump lying about everything, after nicknaming people "Lying Ted" and similar. Hell he even said, with a straight face "I will never lie to you." Think about this. Obama said, "If you like your plan you can keep it," instead of "If you like your plan and it meets the new minimum coverage standards you can keep it," and they all but nailed him to a cross for years. Trump says, "I'm going to give you the best healthcare," and then he tries to destroy it, partly succeeds, and does nothing to replace it at all.
Trump saying he is great for the press, health care, African Americans, Mexicans, etc, and doing things that show the opposite.
Once upon a time hyprocrisy and lies mattered, but it doesn't seem to now. Very few have changed teams as a result. The Tribes are set. Sure a little movement happens, but mostly you just motivate both bases, with increasing hate and increasing devotion and/or fear. Hell Trump just talked smack about the guy in charge of getting Osama Bin Laden. The fox news article is, "RNC backs Trump attack on retired Navy Admiral William McRaven" In short, the republican national convention didn't repudiate him, they backed him up.
Trump's words there were, "He was a hillary/obama backer" That's it. For Trump backing the opposing party, even if its not true, is the same as what? Being evil? Being wrong? I don't get it.
It's clear that Trump has no decency, but shouldn't some other republicans stand up? It seems they are quite happy to walk down the nature trail to hell (road to authoritarian rule).
I'm about to eat a turkey and lots of good pie to celebrate my heritage, before heading out on a passport that is trusted and accepted in most of the world. What is there to be embarrassed about? It's a good country, as countries go. Even the complaints people have are mostly minor.....the vast, vast majority of us have healthcare, and most of us aren't racist. Working here is great, I have plenty of vacation, and can either work in a big city or afford a humongous house in a suburb (so big that some people get jealous of them and call them McMansions). I have my own preferences, but these are all options.
Just like I don't expect most Russians to be like Putin, most people in the world are accepting of Americans. America is not the only good country, maybe it's not even the best country (that depends how you measure, of course), but it's a good one. Sorry you feel embarrassed about your nationality, maybe you should see a psychologist about that, because you have issues (by definition).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Ranked-choice would be better, but we need to address the rampant gerrymandering.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
How you choose matters little if your vote doesn't carry the same weight as others.
On top of the gerrymandering, we have the problem that the Constitution confers an larger influence on the Presidency and the House (and originally, also the Senate) to voters in small states.
Then, there is voter suppression going on in multiple states.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
I hate both parties. Both parties suffer from personality worship disorder.
The important thing, however, is that you have managed to paint yourself as superior to all others without shouldering any burden of of producing, much less implementing via popular vote, any solutions. Well done.
Ivanka didn't:
Set up a private email server in her own house the way Hillary did.
Send thousands of classified emails from said account.
Destroy thousands of pieces of evidence while under FBI investigation.
This is taking butthurt partisan false equivalencies to 11.
That's what makes these stories perfect. Either report on how someone outside of government had access to a government email account or how someone used a non-government account before and while transitioning into government. Report that the presidents wife Is illegally using government resources or that she didn't use them enough. Report that Trumps people are diplomatically inept and unwilling to take a perfectly reasonable meeting with Russia or report the scandal of how they were meeting with Russia... if you can flip a modern news story around and get just as bad of a scandal then it isn't news. And a lot of it isn't news. Evergreen quote: There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted â" and you create a nation of law-breakers â" and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with.
This is more than relevant because of how Trump trolls manufactured the original issue. Not to mention violently ironic. "To cover up her corrupt dealings." As a further embarrassment of the Trump crime family, this ranks right up there with Yeti Pubes.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Where is your outrage over that?
Stop lying. You are pretending to be "Fair and Balanced", but what you are truly doing is spewing right wing disinformation.
If being a hypocrite was a toxin you would be dead and the region around your body would be treated like a radioactive disaster zone.
Why is Snark Required?
If we're going to contemplate a rethink of the mechanics of government, can I suggest that we start at "first principles"?
I may have this completely wrong (and happy to be corrected, but this is secondary to my point)... but I think that the origins of what we currently think of as representative democratic government originates in the UK in the Middle Ages. In return for money for wars, the King was forced to give up some power and through that deal, the UK gradually transitioned to representative government. The House of Commons in the UK was founded in 1341 - the fourteenth century!
Here's the key part... The technology of the day was "horse and rider". It took between 4 days and one week to travel from London to York. The fastest means of communication was a courier on a fast horse... This meant that the only way the areas in the north of the country could participate in the decisions of government was to pick a volunteer who would travel to London (the seat of power) and represent the town or village. What has happened, then is that we have adopted a model of government that was effectively forced by the limitations of transport of the age.
In other words, we have based today's model of government upon a set of conditions that are very nearly 700 years old and are completely out-dated.
With modern communications technologies it is entirely practical for our government to allow us, as citizens, to participate at a much greater level than we do today. Indeed, any major decision could easily be supported by an all-digital referendum. For example, we might decide that we would only go to war with another country if a democratic majority of citizens agreed that it was necessary to do so.
When I make this observation in discussions with friends, I sometimes get challenges along the lines of, "It would be too easy to rig those sorts of votes..." but to which my response is always to point out that every single day we process billions of dollars worth of transactions electronically. Many people conduct their banking by mobile phone. Many more use the internet. So there are ways and means by which we could make this secure.
You might wonder why is it that we don't have this form of more democratic voting already? Why do we continue to rely upon representative government if a better alternative is available? The answer is simple: corruption is much easier to achieve when you only have a small number of people you need to bribe/blackmail/coerce. No? Just look at the amount of money in politics. Just look at the amount spent in campaign contributions? Just look at the number of lobbyists running around in the halls of power. A move toward distributed democratization would truly give power back to the people. It would also reduce the vast and expensive machine of government to an administrative office that served the will of the people.
That has to be a good thing.
The reason we don't have more direct democracy is that to work properly it requires the population to be well informed, and for the most part populations aren't. People prefer to delegate to elected representatives so that they don't have to become an expert on everything government gets involved in and so that theoretically informed decisions are made.
Another issue is that direct democracy is rather powerful, and democracy relies on individuals and individual institutions not having too much power. Checks and balances.
Democracy is a process too, so the nature of individual votes on often binary questions isn't really suited to it.
As an example of what can go wrong, look at Brexit. The population was not informed, in fact most of the information that was available was false or misleading. The question was both binary and unclear: leave or remain, but neither position was defined. And after a slim majority voted in favour of leaving that single event has been used to wield an enormous amount of power, so much so that new balances had to be introduced and it's not clear yet if they are strong enough.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC