Mike Pence defends personal email use, ‘no comparison’ to Hillary Clinton’s illegal activities
Vice President Mike Pence defended his use of a personal email account to conduct state business while he was Indiana’s governor, saying “there’s no comparison” between his situation and the controversy surrounding Hillary Clinton’s illegal use of a private email server that swayed the 2016 presidential campaign.
“There’s no comparison whatsoever,” Pence said following an event he did with House Speaker Paul Ryan in Janesville, Wisconsin, when asked about whether his situation.
Pence used a personal email when he discussed issues like the resettling of Syrian refugees and other matters on an AOL account that was hacked in a phishing scam, according to emails released Thursday.
Mike Pence photo/donkeyhotey
The Indianapolis Star, filed public records Freedom of Information requests while Pence was governor and just now received 29 pages of emails from Pence’s AOL account.
A Pence official confirmed Friday evening that boxes of emails were delivered to the Indiana State House on Thursday. The official would not specify how many boxes, but said the emails were a mixture of messages from the governor’s personal account to state account and from his personal account to non-state governmental accounts.
Pence’s email was compromised last spring, according to a Pence official, and emails were sent from his account saying that he was robbed on an overseas trip and he needed money. After the scam was discovered, he set up an entirely new private email account, the official told CNN.
In one September 2014 exchange, Pence asked his then-homeland security adviser John Hill for an “update of the investigation in Columbus (Indiana) following the vandalism … to area churches … Including the church I grew up in.”
In another email from November 2015, Pence asked his communications staff to promote an op-ed from then-Sen. Dan Coats about Indiana’s fight to bar Syrian refugees from settling in the state.
While there are other examples, none of this is illegal or comparable to Clinton’s scandal.
Obviously, Pence would not be handling classified documents or information. Some Pence emails were blacked out for confidentiality and Gov. Eric Holcomb declined to release others because, according to the Indianapolis Star, “the state considers them confidential and too sensitive to release to the public.”
photo/ Gerd Altmann via pixabay
