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[–] Kannibal [S] ago 

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Bush administration lawyer Richard Painter says the problem could be solved if all White House staff only worked for the president: “Keep all email on the White House server, and don’t be moonlighting for the RNC.” Barring that, he suggested trouble is inevitable. “The problem is people are walking around all day with two email addresses. Our people screwed up,” he said.

The rnchq.org email address used by the Bush administration is now hosting active Trump staff email addresses, verifiable through the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol. SMTP is the bridge between mail servers. The rnchq.org account is hosted by the same commercial server as it was during the Bush years—smartechcorp.net, based in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Besides the unfortunate P.R. optics of Trump using a nonofficial email server in his White House after a campaign built on attacking a similar practice, there are other, more serious problems. First, obviously, is cybersecurity. Russian hackers didn’t harvest as much material from the RNC system as from the Democrats’, but the system was still hackable. Second is transparency. Trump and other Republicans throughout the 2016 campaign voiced concerns about the transparency of Clinton’s use of a “home-brew” personal email server in her basement. FBI Director James Comey called her email practices “extremely careless,” and the investigation and lingering taint of suspicion arguably cost her the election.

The chief effect of using the RNC server in the Bush years was to leave investigators who wanted to know more about the origins of the Iraq War in the dark—for years. It remains impossible to determine whether Bush staffers ever sent classified material over the RNC system.