Did Melania Trump Use Personal Email for Government Business? FRINFORMSUM 9/4/2020

Book Alleges Melania Trump Joins Growing List of Trump Administration Officials to Use Personal Email

A new book by First Lady Melania Trump’s former adviser, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, alleges that Mrs. Trump  “regularly used a private Trump Organization email account, an email from a MelaniaTrump.com domain, iMessage and the encrypted messaging app Signal while in the White House” for conducting official government business. Wolkoff makes the claim in her upcoming book, “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady.” (Wolkoff disclosed in an interview with the Washington Post that she also did not use White House email while working in her official capacity.) The Presidential Records Act technically allows White House officials to use their personal email for official business, but the emails must be copied on official government servers “not later than 20 days” after they were created. 

The First Lady joins a growing list of high-ranking federal officials who have improperly used private email and/or failed to preserve records. Here are a few recent low-lights:

• In 2019, a Department of Education Inspector General Report found that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos used four personal email addresses for government business and that her emails “were not always being properly preserved,” which the IG report noted meant responsive records “were not included in the results of a public records request.” The IG report specified, “In response to one FOIA request for email to and from any private email account controlled by the Secretary, we found that the Department did not identify or produce responsive email that we identified during our review. For another FOIA request, the Department did identify and produced an email sent by the Secretary from her private account.”
• It was also revealed – through a FOIA lawsuit –  that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross regularly used his personal email address for government business.
• The Wall Street Journal reported – also in 2019 – that both “Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and daughter Ivanka Trump, both advisers to the president, had used either personal email accounts or the messaging application WhatsApp to conduct official business”.
• In 2018 the Washington Post reported that Ivanka Trump “sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules”.
• Newsweek reported in 2017 that Trump administration officials including Kellyanne Conway, Jared Kushner, Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon reportedly used Republican National Committee email handles for government purposes – which is prohibited – and failed to forward them to government accounts for preservation.
• The phenomenon is certainly not unique to the Trump administration. Hillary Clinton famously used a personal email and server while Secretary of State. Others in the Obama administration who flouted federal records law include: former Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa Jackson, who used the pseudonym Richard Windsor to receive email; former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, who improperly deleted thousands of text messages (which also are federal records) from her official agency cell phone; and former Internal Revenue Service official Lois Lerner, whose emails regarding Obama’s political opponents “went missing or became destroyed.”

The government’s failure to preserve its emails dates all the way back to January 1989 – beginning with an attempt by the outgoing Reagan White House to destroy its email backup tapes. This destruction was only thwarted by the National Security Archive’s lawsuit, which first established emails as federal records. Read more about the Archive’s decades-long battle to preserve White House email here.

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Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld (left) listens as President Álvaro Uribe (right) speaks to a group assembled at the Colombian presidential residence on August 19, 2003. (Photo by TSGT Andy Dunaway, U.S. Air Force)

The Friends of “El Viejo”: Declassified Records Detail Suspected Paramilitary, Narco Ties of Former Colombian President Uribe

Under house arrest in a case linking him to a feared paramilitary bloc, former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe Vélez, perhaps the most important political figure in Colombian history, finds his legacy hanging in the balance. Declassified documents recently published by the Archive reveal new details about his suspected links to narcotraffickers and the paramilitary groups who called him “El Viejo.”

One memo from 2004 shows that a top Pentagon deputy told Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that “Uribe almost certainly had dealings with the paramilitaries” during the period at issue in the current case. The document is the first declassified evidence available that concerns about Uribe’s presumed paramilitary ties reached the highest levels of the Defense Department.

Another highlight is a cable from 1997 describing a Colombian congressman’s view of the paramilitary situation in eastern Antioquia and “the web of relationships” between then-governor Uribe, “landowners, paramilitaries, and guerrillas.” The congressman said Uribe, himself a rancher, had ties to other landowners in the area who “pay paramilitaries to go after guerrillas.”

The declassified records include Donald Rumsfeld “snowflakes,” Defense Intelligence Agency reports, U.S. Embassy Bogota cables, a presidential decision directive, a CIA report on the Colombian Army’s links to paramilitary forces and other materials. The National Security Archive obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act and the Mandatory Declassification Review process.

If you’re interested in more stories and declassified documents regarding Colombia, visit the Archive’s Colombia Documentation Project. 

Energy Projects Ramped Up Without Usual Environmental Reviews

A FOIA lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity against the Council on Environmental Quality, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Bureau of Land Management has won the release of documents showing that the “agencies are working to exempt dozens of major energy projects from key environmental laws.” One such document is a July 15, 2020 letter that fulfills the reporting requirements of Executive Order 13927, “On Accelerating the Nation’s Economic Recovery from the COVID-19 Emergency by Expediting Infrastructure Investments and Other Activities” (the EO instructs certain agencies to “cut back on environmental reviews required under the Endangered Species Act, Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act and other environmental laws”). The July 15 letter outlines 60 projects slated for expedition, and Courthouse News’ Alexandra Jones reports the projects “involve oil and natural gas development, mining, energy storage, and renewable energy, as well as livestock grazing, transportation and storm management.”

The Center for Biological Diversity filed the lawsuit after all three agencies failed to respond to the respective FOIA requests within the statutory 20-day timeline provided in the FOIA.

Salvador Allende during his inaugural parade, November 3, 1970 (photo credit: Naul Ojeda)

“Allende Wins” – Declassified Records Capture U.S. Reaction to First Free Election of a Socialist Leader 

“Chile voted calmly to have a Marxist-Leninist state, the first nation in the world to make this choice freely and knowingly,” U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry dramatically reported to Washington in a cable titled “Allende Wins” on September 4, 1970. “[W]e have suffered a grievous defeat; the consequences will be domestic and international; the repercussions will have immediate impact in some lands and delayed effect in others.”

On the 50th anniversary of the history-changing election of Salvador Allende in Chile, the National Security Archive today posted a selection of previously declassified documents recording the reaction of U.S. officials to the first democratic election of a Socialist leader in Latin America, or elsewhere. Allende’s victory set in motion a furious effort, ordered by President Nixon, supervised by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, and implemented by the CIA, to destabilize Chile and undermine Allende’s ability to govern—an effort that set the stage for the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet on September 11, 1973.

More “Dubious Secrets” From the Pentagon

If you are looking for examples of a broken declassification system, look no further than the most recent blog from the Archive’s Bill Burr, “Declassification at the Pentagon II: More Silly Secrecy”. In this instance, the Defense Department withheld a document – nearly in its entirety – that had previously been declassified in full by the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP). As Burr concludes, this latest “dubious secret” shows that – in addition to a much-needed centralized declassification process at the Pentagon, “ISCAP declassification decisions ought to have a far weightier impact than they do. Each ISCAP decision should provide the ground rules or parameters for future declassification decisions on a given topic.” 

A longer list of some extreme “dubious secrets” can be found here.