Remember when Donald Trump called for his opponent Hillary Clinton to be "locked up" for using a private email server to conduct government business? As it turns out, he doesn't seem to be applying the same standard to his own White House.
As Politico reports, officials trying to coordinate with the Trump transition team are raising red flags over their use of private servers and non-government devices -- especially after both China and Iran tried to hack Trump and his running mate JD Vance ahead of the election.
According to Michael Daniel, a former White House cybersecurity coordinator during the second Obama administration who now runs his own security nonprofit, those concerns remain salient.
"I can assure you that the transition teams are targets for foreign intelligence collection," Daniel told Politico. "There are a lot of countries out there that want to know: What are the policy plans for the incoming administration?"
Trump's team has, according to the report, conducted an entirely privatized transition. Instead of working with any .gov emails or servers, the transition is instead sending emails associated with the transition47.com, trumpvancetransition.com, and djtfp24.com websites. The Trump transition is also using its own cybersecurity support, Politico notes.
All this, it's worth noting, is exactly what sank Clinton's campaign in 2016 -- and put Trump in the White House instead.
Officials with the outgoing Biden administration have, according to two insiders who spoke to the website, advised their people that they can choose to meet for in-person document exchanges and meetings that could otherwise have been done electronically.
A White House spokesperson told Politico that federal agencies have been reminded that they can choose to "only offer in-person briefings and reading rooms in agency spaces" if they're concerned about security, and that they can require officials with the Trump transition to "attest" their security is up to government snuff.
"Because they don't have official emails, people are really wary to share things," a State Department official told Politico on condition of anonymity. "I'm not going to send sensitive personnel information to some server that lives at Mar-a-Lago while there are so many fears of doxxing and hacking."
"They have to physically come and look at the documents on campus," the official continued, "especially for anything with national security implications."
A spokesperson for the Trump transition, meanwhile, confirmed that the team is conducting all its business on a "transition-managed email server" and insisted that it's using "security and information protections," without specifying what they were.
According to that spox, using private servers eliminates the need for "additional government and bureaucratic oversight" -- a far cry from the "lock her up" battle cry of yore.