President Trump spent the better part of his 2016 campaign arguing that there was something seriously wrong with Hillary Clinton’s private email server. People attending his rallies routinely chanted, “Lock her up.” You’d think that would mean that he’d take cybersecurity seriously in his own administration.
But as became clear on Thursday, first son-in-law Jared Kushner used Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp to conduct White House business.
“During a meeting with Mr. Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, Mr. Lowell confirmed that Mr. Kushner has been using the messaging application WhatsApp as part of his official White House duties to communicate with foreign leaders,” wrote House Oversight Chairman Elijah Cummings, D-Md., in a letter sent to the White House on Thursday.”
That same letter raised concerns about White House staff using personal emails for official business and indicated that the White House had failed to honor previous bipartisan congressional requests for documents.
[Also read: Ivanka Trump used private email account to discuss official White House business]
Although WhatsApp is popular for its encrypted messaging service, it doesn’t provide adequate security for sensitive government business. It has vulnerabilities that can be exploited. It is also forbidden under the Presidential Records Act and the Federal Records Act to avoid the use of official channels, where they can be archived and recorded as required.
Those laws do provide that official communications on personal accounts can be forwarded to the official account within 20 days, and Kushner’s lawyer indicated that he had done this by forwarding screenshots. But even diligent screenshots can capture only limited snippets of conversations. They fail to provide context. They don’t include clickable links or contact information. At best, they are fragmentary records.
Moreover, since these conversations occurred on an unofficial, personal account, any determination of which records are missing would require scrolling through old chats and messages which can be deleted by the user.
Clearly, these practices are every bit as unacceptable now as they were when Hillary Clinton engaged in them. Trump can’t look the other way without looking ridiculous.
