The Vice President of the United States, Mike Pence, regularly conducted state business using his personal email account to carry out state business while he was the Governor of Indiana. The emails released on Thursday 2, showed that Pence discussed delicate matters and homeland security problems through the email account. The released emails also indicate that Pence used his AOL private account to consult questions that ranged from the state’s reaction to terror attacks worldwide to security gates at the governor’s residence. An FBI update on the arrests of some men on charges of terror-related federal offenses was relayed to Pence from one of his trusted state homeland security advisers.
“Update on the investigation in Columbus (Indiana) following the vandalism to area churches, including the church I grew up in.” Pence requested John Hill, his homeland security adviser, in September 2014. In November 2015, through his personal account, Pence wanted to promote Sen. Dan Coats op-ed about barring of Syrian refugees from settling in Indiana. Pence was also made aware of a terror assessment by the FBI by Hill.
Pence came out to his defense saying that there was no similarity between the situation at hand and the contentious issue that was a thorn in Hillary Clinton’s presidential race in 2016. “There’s no comparison whatsoever,” said Pence at an event that he and Paul Ryan, the House Speaker, attended in Jacksonville, Wisconsin.
The Vice President’s Washington office released a statement on Thursday saying, “Similar to previous governors, during his time as Governor of Indiana, Mike Pence maintained a state email account and a personal email account. As Governor, Mr. pence fully complied with the Indiana law regarding email use and retention. Government emails involving his state and personal accounts are being archived by the state consistent with Indiana law, and are being managed according to Indiana’s Access to Public Records Act.”
Experts in cyber-security raised questions about the security of the sensitive information that was relayed in Pence’s personal accounts since these personal email accounts are much less secure compared to the government email accounts. To prove the point Pence’s personal email account was hacked via a phishing attack.
Moreover, there are concerns about the transparency of these personal email accounts given that they cannot be immediately found on state servers. Public Records Requests usually conduct a search on state servers for transparency.
Pence’s attorneys delivered thirteen boxes of state-related emails to the Indiana Statehouse.
Gov. Eric Holcomb’s (Indiana’s new governor) spokeswoman, Stephanie Wilson, said: “Yesterday we received a large delivery of paper documents.” She also added, “and there’s more to come.”
Marc Lotter, Pence’s spokesman, mentioned that the records had emails to and from the government accounts, including emails between the personal AOL account that Pence had and other email accounts that the state government did not own.
Mr. Lotter also mentioned that on January 9, Pence’s attorneys attempted to deliver the email records, but there was confusion as the day coincided with the inauguration of Holcomb. So the lawyers decided to hold on to the boxes.
