Months Later, VP Mike Pence Ready To Turn Over Private Emails, Explain What An AOL Account Is

from the as-transparent-as-he's-forced-to-be dept

Months after he left office to become Trump's running mate, former Indiana governor Mike Pence is finally releasing emails from his personal AOL accounts. This sort of thing would normally be reserved for only the wonkiest of public records wonks, but the Trump campaign spent a great deal of time deriding Hillary Clinton for using a personal email account to handle official State Department email.

It's slightly more of a big deal, thanks to Pence's efforts to keep these emails from becoming public. He went to court late last year to protect the content of certain emails from being released. Pence's lawyer actually argued the court had no business telling the governor's office what can and can't be redacted. So much for the idea of checks and balances.

As the result of multiple requests and multiple lawsuits, Pence is now releasing most of what [his lawyer says] is contained in his AOL accounts.

Pence attorney Karoline Jackson said in a recent email to the state's legal counsel that “a complete electronic production of state records" from Pence's time as governor had been delivered to the state as of June 23.

The office of Pence's successor, Gov. Eric Holcomb, said the records consist of state-related emails from two AOL accounts Pence used as governor.

"Our office is now in the process of reviewing the records, and we anticipate being in a position to provide copies of records that are responsive to pending (public record) requests soon," Holcomb spokeswoman Stephanie Wilson said.

So, according to his own spokespeople, Pence will finally be complying with the state's public records law. Not that he didn't try to be a dick about it.

Previously, Pence had only provided some of his AOL emails to the state, and those he did provide were in paper form, making them difficult to search.

Fortunately for those requesting the emails, the new, full batch will come in electronic form, which will greatly assist them in finding the contents they're interested in. According to the WHAS11 report, there are more than 50 open records requests targeting Pence's AOL emails.

While this doc dump will result in far more transparency than Pence is used to, there are still some concerns about what's being withheld. Rather than have his former office review the emails before turning them over to requesters, Pence had his private lawyer take a look at them instead. That's not really the way things are supposed to work for public officials. This will make redactions and withheld documents more difficult to challenge, as there's another layer -- a non-government layer -- of vetting separating requesters from their requested documents.

There's also a good chance whatever's being looked at is incomplete. Public officials who use private email for official business are supposed to forward all work-related emails to government servers for storage. At this point, there appears to be no indication Pence has done that. Instead, a privately-employed lawyer has been picking through what's left in two private AOL accounts and everyone involved is claiming, without supporting evidence, they're living up to the letter and spirit of Indiana's open records laws.

Filed Under: emails, foia, mike pence, public records, transparency

Vice President Fails To Demand An FBI Investigation After His Private Email Account Is Hacked

from the investigations-are-for-other-people dept

I can only assume Mike Pence is so self-absorbed he's literally incapable of recognizing his own hypocrisy. Either that or he's completely shameless.

After engaging in a presidential campaign where much was made of Hillary Clinton's private email address/server, Pence went to court to prevent his AOL emails from being released to public records requesters.

I can only assume Pence is now welcoming an FBI investigation into his use of an AOL account.

Clinton routed sensitive documents through an insecure personal server. Pence is doing the same. While Clinton was advised against setting up her own personal email server, it's likely Pence has had an AOL account for a long, long, long time. Sure, there's a difference between taking matters into your own hands and leaving your email security up to a third party, but the end result is no different: both were using private accounts to handle government business -- business that included the classified and sensitive information.

The main difference here is we know Pence's email account has been hacked. There were attempts made on Clinton's email server, but nothing out there suggests any of those attacks were successful. Considering Pence's earlier adamance about Clinton's careless email habits, it's probably time to invite the FBI to take a look at his careless handling of sensitive documents.

Emails released to IndyStar in response to a public records request show Pence communicated via his personal AOL account with top advisers on topics ranging from security gates at the governor’s residence to the state’s response to terror attacks across the globe. In one email, Pence’s top state homeland security adviser relayed an update from the FBI regarding the arrests of several men on federal terror-related charges.

Cyber-security experts say the emails raise concerns about whether such sensitive information was adequately protected from hackers, given that personal accounts like Pence's are typically less secure than government email accounts. In fact, Pence's personal account was hacked last summer.

Politicians routinely have to eat their words. They're rarely shy about casting the first (and several follow-up) stones, even while their own sins run dark and deep. But a guy who has an email investigation to at least partially thank for his new position should be following an own-words-based diet for the next several months. If nothing else, it might (MIGHT!) push him towards the occasional second thought before hitting "tweet."

If Pence were intellectually honest, he'd replace Clinton's name with his own in the statement he made to "Meet the Press" last year.

“What’s evident from all of the revelations over the last several weeks is that Hillary Clinton I operated in such a way to keep her my emails, and particularly her my interactions while Secretary of State with the Clinton Foundation governor of Indiana, out of the public reach, out of public accountability,” Pence said. “And with regard to classified information she I either knew or should have known that she I was placing classified information in a way that exposed it to being hacked and being made available in the public domain even to enemies of this country.”

Pence's former office is releasing a small subset of his AOL emails. The Indy Star has obtained around 30 of them, but the governor's office says it's withholding a majority of them because they're either (a) deliberative documents or (b) too damn sensitive to be released publicly.

If the governor's office won't release them, perhaps the hackers will. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but sometimes an outsider kicking in the door and throwing open the blinds is the only way to achieve the transparency the public deserves.

Filed Under: classified info, emails, fbi, foia, hacked, hillary clinton, mike pence, private servers, public records

Lock Them Up! Trump Staff Still Using Private Republican National Committee Email Accounts

from the well,-it's-bad-when-our-political-opponents-do-it... dept

Time to lock up Donald Trump? Or at least his staff?

Senior Trump administration staffers, including Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon, have active accounts on a Republican National Committee (RNC) email system, Newsweek has learned.

The system (rnchq.org) is the same one the George W. Bush administration was accused of using to evade transparency rules after claiming to have “lost” 22 million emails.

Seems like Trump might want to engage in a forced migration of staffers to official White House email accounts in the near future. Can't have cries of "lock him up" being fired back at his administration -- not after using Hillary Clinton's email server as a campaign plank for so many months.

Sure, there's nothing strictly illegal about utilizing a private email account while in office. But every bit of official business needs to be handled by official accounts. Government employees are required to forward any official emails to official accounts and to disclose any private accounts upon taking office.

Making frequent use of personal accounts is just bad optics. And, in the case of the RNC accounts, it's also a possible security issue.

The RNC email system, according to U.S. intelligence, was hacked during the 2016 race.

And there's insecurity on top of insecurity. A hacker spoke with CNN after discovering Trump and his administration are running several accounts -- both Gmail and Twitter -- without using the most basic of security settings: two-factor authentication. Correction: The hacker actually criticized their failure to use a security setting that requires password resets to be requested with an email or phone number. Twitter responded suggesting that two-factor authentication and additional security protocols are in place on White House accounts, but would not comment on these specific accounts.

WauchulaGhost says he found the likely email associated with Melania Trump's handle within twenty minutes. He said the email associated with Vice President Mike Pence was easy to guess once you saw the redacted version: vi***************@gmail.com, which WauchulaGhost pieced together as vicepresident2017@gmail.com. It has since been changed, but the president and first lady's email addresses remain the same. (And the VP account still doesn't have the extra layer of security.)

And today, there are even more detailed reports, showing that the @POTUS account is secured with a gmail address.

Given the President's ability to make markets move with a single tweet, leaving accounts like these unsecured is begging for catastrophe. The news that the VP and President are still using Gmail accounts is also a problem and not just because of the lack of two-factor authentication. It signals that the Trump Administration is planning to do some official business off the FOIA-able/archivable books. That third parties are disclosing these accounts suggests the administration is in no hurry to do so.

Trump's staff may want to engage in some public disavowals of these personal email accounts, especially considering all the noise the campaign made about Hillary Clinton's private email server, its security issues, and the dubious legality of routing classified documents through unsecured servers.

If not, well… that will be completely unsurprising. Not that Trump won't hold himself and his staffers to the same standard he held Clinton, but because politicians are a mostly-hypocritical bunch who like to point fingers at everyone but themselves.

That's why we tend to steer clear of partisan arguments here at Techdirt. This isn't a post about Trump being more wrong than Hillary Clinton. They're both wrong. Trump's staff has a chance to head this off before it becomes a weapon to be wielded against his re-election campaign. If his administration doesn't distance itself from private email accounts, it will make Trump no better or worse than those that have come before him. Unfortunately, that will just make him the same as everyone else. And that's not what he ran on. And that's not what his backers want to see.

But it's incredibly tempting to keep communications out of the public's hands for as long as possible (if not forever) by routing work emails through private accounts. There are statutes and regulations to guard against this, but they're mostly toothless. So, it's up to each politician to determine their personal level of integrity. Many have opted for deliberate opacity, preferring their own secrecy to their obligations to the public that elected them. Will Trump be any better? Or will his staffers find a way to rationalize away their hypocritical stance on private email accounts? According to the statutes they must comply with, we'll know the answer in a couple of weeks.

Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a Washington-based government watchdog that requests and collects classified information, sued the Bush administration (along with CREW) over the RNC server and lost emails, and is still waiting to see what was in them. “If senior aides to President Trump were using private RNC servers on the afternoon after the inauguration, they have about 16 days to copy them into the official White House systems. If not, not they are in violation of the law,” he says.

Filed Under: donald trump, email, foia, mike pence, private emails, security

VP Elect Mike Pence Goes To Court To Keep His Emails Secret

from the hypocrisy-again dept

After making it a key plank of the Trump/Pence campaign that the public needed to see what was in Hillary Clinton's emails, it does seem somewhat ironic that VP Elect Mike Pence is now headed to court to protect what's in some of his emails as governor of Indiana.

The administration is fighting to conceal the contents of an email sent to Gov. Mike Pence by a political ally. That email is being sought by a prominent Democratic labor lawyer who says he wants to expose waste in the Republican administration.

The circumstances are different, but the general principle is the same -- and there's a really important issue at stake when it comes to FOIA and public records issues. The background is fairly convoluted, but here's a quick summary. After President Obama announced a plan to defer enforcement of certain immigration laws for certain individuals, a few states were upset about it, and Texas and Indiana (where Pence is governor) sued the President. Pence hired an outside law firm to handle the case, and a local lawyer thought this was a waste of taxpayer funds. The lawyer filed public records requests to get access to emails about the decision to hire the law firm and to find out the costs to taxpayers.

Pence's office released some emails, but they were apparently redacted in places -- and in one case an email referred to an attached white paper that was not included. The lawyer who filed the request, William Groth, went to court to demand that the Pence administration reveal the full email with the attached white paper. The Pence administration has argued that it's not subject to public records requests as "attorney-client" work material -- but also that the courts are not allowed to question what the government chooses to release or redact under public records laws. A lower court agreed -- following an Indiana Supreme Court ruling saying that the courts cannot "meddle" in public records decisions by the legislative or executive branch due to "separation of powers." That's a bizarre reading of the law that seems to actually turn the concept of separation of powers on its head, as it kind of destroys a key part of that separation: the checks and balances of the three branches of government.

Either way, Groth has appealed, and that means that Pence is effectively going to court to argue that his emails as governor need not be revealed. Now, you can (and I'm sure some folks will...) argue that this is entirely different than the Clinton situation. But... it really isn't. The key issue in talking about the "33,000" emails that Clinton supposedly deleted was the fact that her legal team basically made the decision by themselves what documents were related to her government work and should be turned over, and which were personal, and thus deleted. If Pence is arguing that his office alone should get to determine which emails can be revealed and which cannot, it seems fairly hypocritical of him to also have argued that Clinton and her team shouldn't have been able to make the same decision.

But, of course, this is politics and the only real form of consistency is you argue for what benefits you and your team, no matter how contradictory it may be compared to when you're in similar situations.

But getting beyond the hypocritical symmetry here, this is an incredibly important issue. For many, many years, we've reported on how various governments -- federal, state, local -- seem to go out of their way to avoid truly complying with various FOIA and public records regulations. Indiana's ruling that such decisions cannot be challenged in court is ridiculous and basically takes away all of the power behind the state's public records law. Government officials can just refuse to release or redact whatever they want and get away with it. That's not any way to create government transparency. It's a way to hide corruption and sketchy behavior.

Filed Under: emails, foia, hillary clinton, indiana, mike pence, public records, redaction, separation of powers