Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is the latest member of the Trump administration to get caught for using her personal email to conduct official business in what appears as yet another contradiction to Donald Trump's incessant attacks on Hillary Clinton's use of a private server when she was secretary of state.
The agency's inspector general reported on May 16 that it found a "limited number of emails" from DeVos' private accounts from January 2017 to April 2018. In total, less than 100 emails were sent or received to her personal accounts.
Education Department spokeswoman Liz Hill responded to the report on Twitter, minimizing it as "hardly news."
"I get 'DeVos + Personal Email' gets clicks but receiving fewer than 100 emails and then forwarding them to senior staff to ensure they are captured on our government email server is hardly news," she wrote.
But the report now brings the total number of Trump officials who have used personal communication tools during their time in the administration to eight: DeVos, Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, Stephen Miller, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, K.T. McFarland and Reince Priebus.
In March, the House Oversight Committee reported that it had evidence Trump's daughter and son-in-law used personal email accounts and messaging applications like WhatsApp to conduct official White House business.
Clinton and Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez highlighted the irony of the situation shortly after it was revealed Kushner and Ivanka Trump had used private messaging services.
"But his Whatsapp," Ocasio-Cortez tweeted, to which Clinton responded: "Tell me about it."
Tell me about it.
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) March 22, 2019
The House Oversight Committee also discovered that McFarland, the former deputy national security adviser, and Bannon had used personal email accounts to conduct official business. According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, their private communications included a plan to send nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia.
In 2017, TheNew York Times reported that Priebus (the former chief of staff) and Cohn (a former economic adviser) occasionally used private email addresses. Senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, who is still a part of the administration, has also been reported sending or receiving emails on personal accounts.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders responded to the revelation by telling reporters that "all White House personnel have been instructed to use official email to conduct all government related work. They are further instructed that if they receive work-related communication on personal accounts, they should be forwarded to official email accounts."
During the 2016 election, Trump claimed that Clinton conducted business on private servers to hide her unethical activity. The phrase "Hillary's emails" even became a rallying cry for Trump supporters. In April, special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia report revealed that Trump repeatedly requested his 2016 campaign find Clinton's 30,000 missing emails.
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Alexandra Hutzler is currently a staff writer on Newsweek's politics team. Prior to joining Newsweek in summer 2018, she was ... Read more
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