Report: At least 6 top White House advisers used private email accounts

(Image credit: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images)

At least six of President Trump's top advisers — including former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus and ex-chief strategist Stephen Bannon — used private email accounts on occassion to talk about White House matters, several current and former officials told The New York Times on Monday.

On Sunday, a lawyer for Trump's son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner confirmed that Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, created a domain in December called IJKFamily.com for their personal email, and "fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House" from his account. Officials told the Times that in addition to Priebus, Bannon, Kushner, and Ivanka Trump — who reportedly used private emails to conduct business when she was both an unpaid adviser and later a formal adviser — chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and senior adviser Stephen Miller also sent or received "at least a few emails on personal accounts." It isn't known if any of the emails contained confidential information, or how many emails were sent and received from the private accounts.

For oversight reasons, government officials are supposed to use their work emails to conduct business, and if they do use private email accounts, they must forward any work-related emails to their government accounts for preservation purposes. During the campaign, Trump spent much of his time blasting Hillary Clinton for using a private email account during her tenure as secretary of state, leading his supporters at rallies in cries of "Lock her up!"

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.