Trump Hit By Widespread Federal Investigation Into Illegal Email Server Use

0
1167

“Lock her up!” chanted Trump supporters during the 2016 presidential elections in reference to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state, for which she underwent numerous Republican-led investigations. None of Trump’s administrative team seem interested in chanting those same words now that they’re the ones being investigated for doing the same.

In fact, those chants continue at Trump rallies today, although Clinton is now a private citizen and investigations determined that she had committed no crimes. In response to Cummings’ requests for email communications so that White House officials can undergo the exact same kind of probe Clinton endured, the president and his team are once again simply ignoring the demands. It’s not hard to imagine how right-wing heads would have exploded if Clinton and Obama had done the same.

‘House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings said his request, with a July 10 deadline, marks the start of a new review of the private email practices of Trump administration officials that appear to violate federal record-keeping laws.’

While the investigation was once limited to certain communications, the administration’s dismissal of oversight requests has now led the committee to demand all of their emails. Ivanka Trump, Steve Bannon, and K.T. McFarlane have all been named specifically in the probe as violators of the law governing preservation of White House communications. Considering evidence that some of Trump’s team, including Jared Kushner, have worked to set up backchannels to foreign government officials in order to have secret conversations, the probe is more than necessary.

‘Cummings’ letter, addressed to White House counsel Pat Cipollone, also suggested that special counsel Robert Mueller had uncovered even more evidence of violations of presidential recordkeeping law, most notably Bannon’s admission that he routinely used a Blackberry and personal email for “work-related communications” — including conversations with outside adviser Erik Prince — and that “he took no steps to preserve these work communications.”’

The same Republicans who have screamed “lock her up” for the past several years over Clinton and her private email server are suddenly concerned about a “fishing expedition” into the Trump team. Although they spewed outrage over Clinton’s lawyers determining that several thousands private emails on Clinton’s server should not be turned over to officials for the investigation since they were unrelated to her work for the government, they’re fine with Trump’s team refusing to turn over any emails at all.

‘Cummings suggested Monday that his December request, as well as a March 2019 follow-up, went ignored. As a result, he said he decided to expand the request to seek all messages sent by senior White House personnel via private email or messaging apps.

‘A spokesman for Jim Jordan of Ohio, the top Republican on the committee, said the Presidential Records Act “was not intended to create a fishing license for Chairman Cummings to pry into the private communications of the first family. This is yet another example of Democrats’ obsession with finding some rationale to impeach the President.”’

Featured image via Flickr by AFGE under a Creative Commons license