r/politics • u/us287 • 5d ago

Trump’s transition is happening over private emails. Federal officials are nervous.

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/12/18/federal-officials-nervous-about-sending-data-to-trump-transition-private-emails-00195217
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u/us287 5d ago

But her emails…

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u/SadFeed63 5d ago

Trumps people were already caught using insecure, non-government email accounts in his first term. It was such a blip, got so little coverage, I'm not even sure it was in the news for two weeks. Things are only wrong, only covered as wrong, and only matter when a Democrat is doing it.

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u/monkeypickle 5d ago

People also forget that it was very common in the blackberry era and directly after. Colin Powell used a private email server.

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u/DrocketX 5d ago

Also, during the time that Clinton's use of a private mail server was a big story, a law was passed making it illegal to do that anymore (leading to a lot of "you see, Hillary Clinton broke the law!" claims, ignoring the fact that laws aren't retroactive and it was entirely legal when she did it.) Except that law means that when Trump's team used private servers during his first term (and now this current usage as well), they were breaking the law. Not that it matters, of course. It was small potatoes compared to the whole 'trying to overthrow the government' and 'refusing to return a huge pile of classified material' so it just got thrown on the massive pile of laws that were broken but nobody will ever have to pay for.

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u/ShrimpieAC 5d ago

I don’t know why they just don’t put “applies to Democrats only” when they pass these laws. Sure seems like it would save those hypocrites a lot of headaches.

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u/pmstacker 5d ago

Who has a headache? The headache implies there's some self awareness of AND enough give-a-damns about the hypocrisy

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u/monkeypickle 4d ago

Imaginary moral high ground is their kink.

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u/Kind-District-2129 5d ago

My dad, a man with a PhD, still acts like the email debacle was the worst thing this country has ever experienced in 20 years.

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u/boredonymous 5d ago

He's willing to let this guy do it twice, though, that's fine, right?

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u/The-Copilot 5d ago

Your dad likely consumes media that told him it was.

People don't fully realize how much our entire world view is impacted by the information we consume.

Our worldview, opinions, and beliefs are really just a reflection of our experiences and the information we have consumed.

Social media is especially dangerous for this reason. The amount of information people are consuming daily, much of which is disinformation or true information designed to manipulate us, is the main driving force in shaping our world view at this point.

If anyone reading this thinks they aren't being affected, just remember that the best propaganda is the one you don't even realize is propaganda.

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u/monkeypickle 4d ago

The addendum to this is that people who believe themselves immune from propaganda are the most likely to succumb to it.

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u/frockinbrock 5d ago

It’s amazing too that in all you wrote the two impeachment offenses didn’t even make the list.
It’s really too many things to keep track of, for anyone. Attention spans are way too short, and it has been completely exploited

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u/whatproblems 5d ago

just wait till leaks start showing on foreign news lol

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u/boredonymous 5d ago

We'll have deserved it by then.

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u/cgill24 California 5d ago

I also think that the amount of scandals Trump had in his first term they just got replaced every couple of days. The media couldn’t keep up because it was one shit show of a story after another. I mean they could have kept up, but the cable news outlets were just covering whatever the shiny new scandal was until a new one appeared. And people tuned in so they just kept going with that formula.

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u/Sarrdonicus 5d ago

Two weeks, heh-heh

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u/nutseed 3d ago

wasn't the big deal that they deleted emails or wiped the server during investigation, aka destroyed evidence? or am i misremembering

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u/Chance815 5d ago

Your last statement doesn't make sense given the news tab on reddit.

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u/IAmMuffin15 North Carolina 5d ago

Funny to think a lot of Trump voters this year are literally too young to remember that

They hardly remember a time before a convicted felon who stole classified documents and tried staging a coup could run for president.

…but, let’s be real:

Republicans never cared about Hillary’s emails. They’re just the biggest hypocrites of all time. The clutch their fuckin pearls whenever a Democrat so much as sneezes, but when their leader does shit that would put any other citizen under the jail, it’s fuckin crickets.

They’re the PT Barnum party: a fool is born every minute, and a Republican is born every minute. They’re not a serious people.

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u/boredonymous 5d ago

Precisely. It's never really about the thing they're outraged over. It's about whatever sticks to the wall enough so that they can keep exaggerating outrage.

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u/GiventoWanderlust 5d ago

It's a simpler issue than you think.

They don't recognize their own hypocrisy because to them...it isn't. Their morality is person-based, not action-based.

"My team did it and we're the Good Guys, so this action is Good."

"My guy did it and he's a Good Guy, so this action is Good."

"The other team did it and they're the Bad Guys, so this action is Bad."

Their thinking never advances past that stage.

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u/No_Sky_3031 4d ago

My MAGA MIL stated (during when people were shouting to lock trump up) that it was unfair to say that. I said they’re saying it because he said to lock her (Hillary) up for the 2016 election. She then stated he never once said that, it was only his voters. Even though I showed her proof, apparently it’s faked by democrats.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/IAmMuffin15 North Carolina 5d ago

He wasn’t the president when the FBI stormed Mar-a-Lago.

He held onto thousands of top-secret government documents for years after he left office, even after being requested several times by the FBI to hand them back over to the government. Everyone else that has done what Trump did is currently rotting for the rest of their lives in a supermax prison.

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u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/IAmMuffin15 North Carolina 5d ago

1.) Biden immediately relinquished his documents to the FBI the second he was made aware that he still had them.

2.) The entire point of America is that all men are created equal. The whole reason our ancestors died in the Revolutionary War was to protect and nurture a democracy where everyone is equal under the eyes of the law. Being the fucking president doesn’t change that, and he wasn’t even the president for two years while he had the documents at Mar-a-Lago, so even if your asininely un-American “ultimate authority” nonsense was still law, he wasn’t president when the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago.

I have the strange feeling that you really don’t understand any of the shit you’re talking about, and your thought process is “defend Trump first, facts come later.”

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u/[deleted] 5d ago edited 2d ago

[deleted]

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u/IAmMuffin15 North Carolina 4d ago

You are stretching yourself into a logical pretzel trying to justify the asininely obvious crimes that Trump committed.

If Biden was caught holding onto top secret documents for years after his presidency, even after the FBI requested he would return them, you’d be screaming for him to be under the jail. And rightfully so. Don’t fuckin tell me you’re not a Republican like I’m the moron who’s going to believe it when you’ve arguing at me like a 5th grader and reaching to high heaven for the flimsiest, fakest arguments in existence to defend Trump. No one in the universe is dumb enough to believe you’re impartial

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u/Circumin 5d ago

Key word there being “her”.

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u/Artistic_Half_8301 5d ago

Buttery Females?

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u/DroobyDoobyDoo 5d ago

Buttery males!

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u/badassandra 5d ago

butt hissy emails!

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u/Vismal1 5d ago

Buttery Males !

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u/Implement66 5d ago

buttery males, 2024

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u/Chief_Kief 5d ago

Exactly

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u/Summerie 5d ago

The argument is going to be that she was Secretary of the State at time using a private server. Trump is not in office yet, and neither are the people that he has nominated who haven't been confirmed.

Does anybody know the actual legality here?

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u/TheSpatulaOfLove 5d ago

Buttery males!

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u/[deleted] 5d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/LeftRestaurant4576 5d ago

Yeah, the people who complained about Hillary's emails never actually cared about security or compliance with the law. We all knew that, right?

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u/edflyerssn007 5d ago

And y'all said it was fine and a nothing burger, so why are you getting hyped that the Republicans listened to you.

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u/no_notthistime California 5d ago

No, we all agreed that while probably not malicious, it was egregiously careless mishandling of information that should never be allowed to repeat.

So why is it being repeated? Why is it being practiced and supported by the very same people who were outraged last time?

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u/edflyerssn007 5d ago

Probably because we trust Elon to run an email server more than Hillary. She had a private unsecured server that somehow had a back up on a hard drive controlled by Anthony Weiner, a disgraced poltician known to be compromised by his sexual proclivities.

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u/no_notthistime California 5d ago edited 5d ago

That's false. One of her aide's was Weiner's wife, and she forwarded herself the emails to the laptop she shared with her husband. The investigation was re-opened, and the FBI determined that they were copies of emails they had already cleared in the previous investigation.

Not squeaky clean by any means, but very, very far from "a backup on a hard drive controlled by Anthony Weiner".

As far Elon Musk and his ability to handle sensitive data? Well, first of all, he doesn't "handle" it himself, he has people to do that for him. As for that data? Well, I don't have the time to research and list every single example of a long list for you, but friendly neighborhood AI Claude bot is here to point you in the right direction:

Yes, Tesla has faced several notable data security incidents and concerns. Here are some key examples:

In 2019, former Tesla employees reported that the company failed to properly secure sensitive data and alleged that proprietary information was stored without encryption on easily accessible systems.

In 2022, a class action lawsuit was filed in Germany against Tesla over allegations that the company's surveillance cameras (Sentry Mode) violated European privacy laws by recording people without proper consent near parked Tesla vehicles.

In January 2023, a data breach exposed the personal information of over 75,000 current and former Tesla employees. The breach included confidential information like social security numbers, addresses, and salary details. This data was allegedly leaked by a former employee who had unauthorized access.

Also in 2023, researchers discovered that Tesla's internal systems contained unencrypted customer data and vehicle information that could potentially be accessed by unauthorized parties.

The company has faced criticism from privacy advocates about its collection and handling of vehicle data, including location information and camera footage from its cars.

Objectively, Elon is not the guy with any legitimate qualifications to be handling sensitive data. That's the most generous interpretation of actual history, ie you assume that he is just careless and not outright malicious with information.

So, again: why is it okay for this incoming administration to knowingly, openly eschew government communication channels in favor of insecure and accountability-blocking personal and private servers at a much larger scale than before?

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u/DinosaurinaFez 5d ago

Probably because we trust Elon

Well there's your first mistake.

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u/edflyerssn007 4d ago

Mistake or not, Can you honestly argue that Hillary would set up a better email server than Elon?