MSNBC's Morning Joe panel blasted Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and his staffers Tuesday after reports surfaced they had used private, Web-based emails from their work computers for over a year, calling it "outrageous," "befuddling," and "baffling."
"This is outrageous," said panelist and BlazeTV anchor Amy Holmes. "It's not like you were talking about the Secretary of Education or HUD. This is the Department of Homeland Security."
The MSNBC show's guests were particularly troubled by this behavior given the intensely negative publicity on Hillary Clinton after it was revealed she skirted government rules by using a private server at the State Department and then wiped it clean of more than 30,000 emails.
"What could these people have been thinking?" asked former Obama administration official Steve Rattner. "After all of this, to then go and use personal email?"
Johnson and 28 members of his senior staff have used personal accounts from their work computers, even after the practice was banned in 2014, Bloomberg reports:
The department banned such private e-mail on DHS computers in April 2014. Top DHS officials were granted informal waivers, according to a top DHS official who said that he saw the practice as a national security risk. The official said the exempt staffers included Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, Chief of Staff Christian Marrone and General Counsel Stevan Bunnell.
Asked about the exceptions on Monday, the DHS press secretary, Marsha Catron, confirmed that some officials had been exempted. "Going forward," she said, "all access to personal webmail accounts has been suspended."
Future exceptions are to be granted only by the chief of staff. Catron said that a "recent internal review" had found the chief of staff and some others were unaware that they had had access to webmail.
The DHS rule, articulated last year after hackers first breached the Office of Personnel Management, states: "The use of Internet Webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL) or other personal email accounts is not authorized over DHS furnished equipment or network connections." Johnson and the 28 other senior officials sought and received informal waivers at different times over the past year, the official said. Catron said exceptions were decided on a case-by-case basis by the chief information officer, Luke McCormack. DHS employees are permitted to use their government e-mail accounts for limited personal use.
"I just don't understand," host Joe Scarborough said. "Again, we're talking about the Department of Homeland Security ... In these sensitive positions, why go on private email servers outside of the federal government when every day you read a new story about how the Russians or the Chinese are hacking into the most secure email accounts in the world? It's befuddling to me."
"I'd love to hear their side of the story because it's baffling," Rattner said