First lady Melania Trump is accused of using a private email account while in the White House -- even though one of her husband's attacks on Hillary Clinton in 2016 was for doing the same thing.
"Melania 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, according to her former senior adviser and close friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who says she corresponded multiple times a day with the first lady. 'Melania and I both didn’t use White House emails,' says Winston Wolkoff, in an interview with The Washington Post, upon the publication of her tell-all memoir, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady," The Washington Post reported Tuesday.
"The Post has viewed messages dated after the inauguration that appear to be from private email and messaging accounts used by Melania Trump," the newspaper reported. "The messages contained discussions of government hires and contracts (including Winston Wolkoff’s), detailed schedules for the president and first lady during the Israeli and Japanese state visits, strategic partnerships for the first lady’s Be Best initiative, the logistics of the Easter egg roll, and finances for the presidential inauguration, key parts of which Winston Wolkoff, an experienced New York City events producer, planned."
Melania is not the only senior member of the administration to get caught.
"Members of the Trump administration have already faced scrutiny for using private email. The House Oversight Committee last year began looking into the use of private accounts for government business by Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner," the newspaper reminded. "Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross also has used private email to conduct government business. Donald Trump spent much of the 2016 election cycle drawing attention to the FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while she served as secretary of state, calling it 'worse than Watergate.'"
Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, blasted the first lady, noting “if she is doing United States government business, she should be using the White House email.”
“It’s total hypocrisy,” said Painter. “They got elected acting as if Hillary Clinton ought to be in jail for using the wrong email.”
