Trump's Transition Is Happening Over Private Emails. Federal Officials Are Nervous.

Federal officials say they’re worried about sharing documents via e-mail with Donald Trump's transition team because the incoming officials are eschewing government devices, email addresses and cybersecurity support, raising fears that they could potentially expose sensitive government data.

The private emails have agency employees considering insisting on in-person meetings and document exchanges that they otherwise would have conducted electronically, according to two federal officials granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation. Their anxiety is particularly high in light of recent hacking attempts from China and Iran that targeted Trump, Vice President-elect JD Vance and other top officials.

“I can assure you that the transition teams are targets for foreign intelligence collection,” said Michael Daniel, a former White House cyber coordinator who now leads the nonprofit online security organization Cyber Threat Alliance. “There are a lot of countries out there that want to know: what are the policy plans for the incoming administration?”

Trump — who attacked his then-opponent Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server for official business during his first presidential run — is overseeing a fully privatized transition that communicates from an array of @transition47.com, @trumpvancetransition.com and @djtfp24.com accounts rather than anything ending in .gov, and uses private servers, laptops and cell phones instead of government-issued devices.

This break with tradition stems from the Trump team forgoing federal funding and the ethics and transparency requirements that come with it.

While it’s unclear how the decision is impacting a transition that is already behind, with fewer than five weeks remaining until Inauguration Day, one person familiar with the collaboration between the Biden administration and the Trump transition team, granted anonymity to discuss sensitive discussions, said it is further hampering the process. 

The dynamic is slowing efforts to share government materials with members of Trump’s landing teams, the person said, referring to the groups of transition officials assigned to meet with federal agencies ahead of the inauguration.

The White House has sent guidance to federal agencies to be cautious when communicating with the Trump transition, a spokesperson said, reminding them that they can elect to “only offer in person briefings and reading rooms in agency spaces” if they’re uncomfortable sending something electronically.

They also advised federal employees that they can require transition officials to “attest” that their private technology complies with government security standards.

“Because they don’t have official emails, people are really wary to share things,” said a State Department employee granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. “I’m not going to send sensitive personnel information to some server that lives at Mar-a-Lago while there are so many fears of doxxing and hacking. So they have to physically come and look at the documents on campus, especially for anything with national security implications.”

The Trump transition confirmed their reliance on private emails, with spokesperson Brian Hughes saying in a statement that “all transition business is conducted on a transition-managed email server.”

“We have implemented plans to communicate information securely as necessary,” he added, but declined to say what those plans entail. In a statement in late November, transition co-chair Susie Wiles similarly cited unspecified “security and information protections” the team has in place, arguing that they replace the need for “additional government and bureaucratic oversight.”

The transition’s landing teams began arriving this week at some government agencies — more than a month later than past administrations have deployed them — to get up to speed on all of the resources and problems they will soon inherit. It’s a particularly vulnerable time for national security, stressed Daniel, adding that by rejecting government transition support, the Trump team is also opening themselves up to hacking once they’re in power.

“Once someone gets access to some of their information, they can think of ways to send better phishing emails down the road, because they learn more about you,” he explained. “And if you bring that device into a government space, hook it up to a government network, and access it through that account, they're able to steal your credentials and use that to log on and look like you — look like a legitimate user — and it becomes much harder to detect from a security standpoint.”

History is rife with examples of crises that came early in a new administration and were made worse by challenges passing information from an outgoing to an incoming president and his team, from the botched Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in the 1960s to the Waco standoff in the 1990s.

CUNY John Jay College associate professor Heath Brown, who wrote a book about Joe Biden's transition, said modern technology only makes that dynamic more risky and complicated.

“In 2020, it was maybe the single most important worry of the transition team, that they would be hacked, and all of this information, including intelligence information, personnel information about job applicants, the whole procedure would be threatened if there was a hack of the transition team,” Brown said. “The [General Services Administration] is in a position to help with that, but saying no to that help raises questions about whether they have put in place a secure system, as is needed in these situations.”

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