After months of being pounded for her use of a private email server, and rightfully so given all of her mishandling of classified information and efforts to destroy government property with bleachbit and hammers in an apparent effort to evade FOIA laws, Hillary was apparently a little perturbed to learn the Jared Kushner and other White House officials in the Trump administration have also decided to use their private email accounts to conduct official business. Per ABC:
"It’s just the height of hypocrisy," Clinton said in an interview with SiriusXM’s Zerlina Maxwell after being asked to respond to the news on Monday.
As for the repeated attacks by Trump during the 2016 election over Clinton's use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state, "They didn’t mean any of it," she said. "If they were sincere about it, I think you’d have Republican members of Congress calling for an investigation. I haven’t heard that yet."
Clinton called her use of private emails "a dumb mistake but a dumber scandal," and said she regrets that the country "had to go through it."
Of course, Hillary does have a point here but to draw a comparison between her email scandal and Kushner seems a bit of stretch based on what we know so far. As we pointed out a few days ago, even Politico acknowledged that Kushner only sent about 100 emails from his private account about innocuous topics and never mishandled classified information...something that Hillary's team did with some regularity.
Politico reports that, in an ironic twist, Kushner continued to use a private email account that had been set up during the transition to communicate with fellow administration officials during Trump’s first nine months in office, even as Trump continued to bash his former rival’s mishandling of classified information on a private server during her time at the State Department.
While Politico places the implication of wrongdoing front and center in its story, it waits until lower down to provide a key piece of context from the White House communications department: "Kushner sent less than 100 emails from this account, and those that were sent consisted mostly of quips about news items and minor commentary."
Liberals like to talk about the concept of false equivalence, especially in the context of how the media covered the Clinton email scandal vs. coverage of Trump’s more controversial pronouncements and business arrangements. That's what this Kushner story appears to be. Judging by the description, it’s clear that Kushner didn’t rely on his private account to conduct public business, and only used it to send a handful of messages. More to the point, while he may have violated public-information guidelines, he did not improperly handle classified information.
Be that as it may, according to Sarah Sanders, all White House staff have since been instructed to use their government email accounts to conduct official business.
“All White House personnel have been instructed to use official email to conduct all government related work,” she said. “They are further instructed that if they receive work-related communication on personal accounts, they should be forwarded to official email accounts.”
But don't worry too much Hillary, we're sure most of Jared's emails were just about yoga and Kushner family weekend trips...