In her testimony to the House Intelligence Committee right before she left the White House, former communications director Hope Hicks explained that she had also been the victim of villainous hackers.
Hope Hicks told the House Intelligence Committee last week that one of her email accounts was hacked, according to people who were present for her testimony in the panel's Russia probe.
But before you start making hourly trips to Wikileaks to see if you can find Hope complaining about having to clean the chicken grease from Trump’s Twitter phone, the “hacked” in this statement isn’t quite what it would seem. Hicks apparently doesn’t mean that she knows her email has been looted. She doesn’t know that someone’s been logging her responses or that she’s gotten a threat asking for bitcoins. All she means is …
Under relatively routine questioning from Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., about her correspondence, Hicks indicated that she could no longer access two accounts: one she used as a member of President Donald Trump's campaign team and the other a personal account, according to four people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the closed meeting of the Intelligence Committee was supposed to remain private.
So what Hope Hicks is saying is … she forgot her password. Except that she claims to be “savvy” about technology. And if that’s true, then surely she knows the means of informing the email provider that she’s locked out, and using her backup account or phone number to restore access.
Otherwise, what Hicks seems to be saying isn’t just unbelievable, it’s unbelievably convenient.
Hicks was before the committee voluntarily, and she pleaded the inexplicable Trump privilege over all things in response to most questions, so her answers concerning her email were limited.
It is standard practice for lawmakers to ask witnesses about phone numbers and email accounts. But it is uncommon, according to people familiar with the committee process, for a witness to tell lawmakers that he or she no longer has access to past accounts.
From the campaign on, Hicks has supposedly acted as Donald Trump’s email nexus. So her emails during the campaign are of particular interest when it comes to knowing what Trump was told and when. That she’s claiming to be unable to access her campaign email account doesn’t sound like a hoax, it sounds very, very much like an attempt to cover up information. Either Hicks’s email account was provided by a private system connected to the campaign, in which case access should be easily restored, or the email was provided by a public system, all of which have processes for reporting being locked out of an account and restoring access.
It's very difficult to find any legitimate reason why Hicks should be able to claim to no longer have access to her email accounts, unless that reason is that she doesn’t want to admit she has access to her email accounts.
Hicks’ personal email would also seem like a source of potential information concerning her actions in support of Trump, both during the campaign and at the White House. How long would anyone let their personal email be unavailable without taking action to change the situation, unless having that email supposedly locked away was to their advantage?
Corey Lewandowski is scheduled to appear before the same committee on Thursday. It will be interesting to see if Lewandowski, who never served in the White House, also tries to apply Trump’s get out of everything free version of privilege. And someone should inquire about the health of his email.