Does Anyone In Congress Have Any Sense Of Perspective?

Breitbart reported yesterday that Representative Trey Gowdy plans to investigate the use of private emails by government officials in the White House. The initial focus is on Jared Kushner.

The article reports:

The Washington Post first reported Monday that Gowdy, along with ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings (D-MD), wrote to White House counsel Don McGahn and leaders of two dozen federal agencies requesting information about the use of personal email accounts.

Gowdy succeeded Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) as chairman of the committee as it was coming under increasing pressure to turn up the heat on the administration, just as it had so thoroughly investigated, in 2015 and 2016, Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.

Politico first reported Sunday that Kushner, Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, had used a private email account for occasional White House business. Kushner released a statement saying that the emails sent from his personal account were forwarded to his official address and stored in accordance with policy.

The italics are mine. Pray tell, what were the consequences of Hillary Clinton’s having a secret server and deleting thousands of emails? Somehow I seem to remember that there was a lot of talk, but nothing was ever done. In the case of Jared Kushner, the emails were forwarded to his official address and saved. I think there is a difference here.

The article concludes:

“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 personal email account,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement. “These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address.”

Kushner’s usage also differs from Clinton’s in that these instances are infrequent, none appear to have been deleted, and there was no indicated classified information sent. Kushner also did not use a homebrew private server to send the emails as Clinton did. Yet it is likely to draw cries of hypocrisy from opponents of the administration considering how central the Clinton emails were to the 2016 campaign.

The Gowdy/Cummings letter asks for the names of any non-career official who has used a personal account for official business, according to the Post, as well as the names of any officials who use “text messages, phone-based message applications, or encryption software.” The letter reportedly says that the requests are in order to see whether the administration is following records retention laws.

If there were no consequences for Hillary Clinton, why even bother to investigate this? So far the law enforcement arm of the Trump Administration has been no better than the law enforcement arm of the Obama Administration. The current administration is probably our last chance to get rid of the corruption in Washington. It is becoming obvious that Congress is not interested in helping.