A WARM THANK YOU AND DEEP BREATH
By Lisa Desjardins, @LisaDNews
Correspondent

Last week, the House of Representatives voted to hold former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows in criminal contempt for his defiance of subpoenas from the select committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

The vote followed the release of a blistering report by the committee that, among other things, revealed this: Meadows, who at the time was former President Donald Trump’s chief of staff, had communicated in the days leading up to and on Jan 6. using his private Gmail account, cell phone and Signal, an encrypted messaging app. 

If the use of private accounts for official business is ringing a bell, that’s because Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of state dominated headlines in the 2016 presidential race. It sparked political debate, congressional hearings and even criminal inquiry. The investigation resulted in a not-so-smoking gun: then-FBI director James Comey concluded that Clinton’s behavior was “extremely careless,” but not criminal.

We wanted to take a step back to look at what we know about government officials using  private accounts. What’s illegal vs. unethical vs. just unsavory? We posed some of these questions to Richard Painter, who served as chief White House ethics lawyer during the George W. Bush administration. He’s now a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Our conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Is it against the law to use private accounts for official business?  

If you keep the record, then you’re okay. But if you don’t keep the record, then you have a problem under the Presidential Records Act. And every email coming in and out of that White House is a presidential record. So if you're doing government business on your own device, that in itself is not a crime. But if you then turn around and destroy what’s on your device, then you'd violate all of those statutes.

Does the law account for whether information was classified or not? 

You only commit a crime if you intentionally disclose classified information. Maybe by extreme recklessness in disclosing classified information you might commit a crime, such as going and talking about it loudly on a subway. But the prosecutions for disclosure of classified information generally have been limited to intentional disclosures to persons that don’t have the security clearance. 

Is it ‘unethical’ by government standards? 

After Clinton, they tried to prevent a repeat of that – to make a more affirmative public statement that if you choose to use a personal device, you have an obligation to retain it and to take the affirmative step -- and that may be something like copying those emails onto an official government account. … After we’ve gone through this with Karl Rove, we’ve gone through this with Hillary Clinton, I think it would be unethical to just do official government business on your personal account and not copy a government account, to make an affirmative effort to preserve the record.

AND NOW … SOMETHING SWEET

By Dan Cooney, @IAmDanCooney
Social Media Producer/Coordinator

Like many of us, members of Congress are probably in need of a sweet escape from the rush of deadlines and debates that come this time of year. 

Lucky for them, this year marked the triumphant return of the gingerbread replica of the U.S. Capitol building. 2021 marks the fifth edition of the gingerbread model and the first time it's been back within the walls of the Capitol since 2019.

This year's display, which is an estimated 3 feet tall and 5 feet long, features more than 30 gingerbread characters. (Those inside the gingerbread structure don face masks, while those outside are without masks.) Fifteen feet of LED string lights, a couple of Nutcracker characters and a giant gingerbread Christmas tree complete the confectionary concoction.

When Fred Johnson III (pictured above), the senior area manager of food operations for Sodexo in the House of Representatives, first built the Capitol gingerbread model in 2017, he estimated that the process took him six weeks because he was starting from scratch. Now with five years of experience under his belt, he and his team produced this year's model in less than a week.

Some lawmakers are using the model as part of their Christmas cards, Johnson said. Going forward, the gingerbread Capitol is “never not going to happen. It's now part of the tradition."

“I’d like to hope that it’s there 100 years from now,” he said.

#POLITICSTRIVIA
By Matt Loffman, @mattloff
Politics Producer