WASHINGTON – Hypothetically, let’s suppose you’re an attorney who has received an email from a client relating to a potentially sensitive topic, like a possibly inappropriate use of a personal email account or mishandling of work-related materials sent to a personal account.
If you’d like to avoid looking like a gullible fool and can’t prevent such from happening simply by looking at the email headers on the messages purportedly sent by your client, three little words can go a long way toward heading off a problem before it develops: “Please call me.”
Those three words would put a prankster in a tough bind, unless he’s able to convincingly imitate the voice of the person he’s pretending to be –- not to mention spoof their telephone number.
If only attorney Abbe Lowell had thought to peck out those three words in response to a goofball internet troll who recently drew Lowell into a ludicrous email exchange by pretending to be Jared Kushner, Lowell wouldn’t find himself this week confronting headlines like “Prankster tricks Jared Kushner’s lawyer into believing he had Lego fetish porn on his private server.”
Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad Lowell didn’t think to confirm the identity of the person purporting to be Kushner, because if he had we would have been denied the entertainment of reading exchanges like this:
Faux Kushner: “I’m so embarrassed. It’s fairly specialist stuff, half naked women on a trampoline, standing on legoscenes, the tag for the movie was #standingOnTheLittlePeople”
Abbe Lowell: “Don’t delete. Don’t send to anyone. Let’s chat in a bit.”
None of this would be a big deal (frankly, I’m not convinced it’s a big deal anyway), except Lowell had already publicly suggested he was aware of the contents of Kushner’s potentially problematic emails.
“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Lowell said earlier this week, referring to Kushner’s use of a private email address to conduct official White House business. “Fewer than a hundred emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. All non-personal emails were forwarded to his official address and all have been preserved in any event.”
Presumably, had Lowell reviewed the emails in question, he would have known none of those messages involved a half-naked woman on a trampoline, or a “protagonist” who “looks exactly like a younger Hillary Clinton.”
In fairness to Lowell, he may have assumed Kushner initially held back the emails containing porn, and his advice to the person he believed to be Kushner is hardly a smoking gun demonstrating the attorney issued his previous statement without first reviewing the evidence.
Of greater concern to me (if I were Kushner, that is) would be the notion my attorney thinks it plausible I’ve been sitting around sharing porn links with other members of the administration or White House staff. I’d be concerned about this perception even if my slate of official duties included mostly trivial items, like advising the President, “reinventing the government,” serving as the primary point of contact within the White House for representatives of more than two dozen foreign countries and negotiating a lasting peace in the Middle East, to name just a handful of the tasks reportedly assigned to Kushner.
On the bright side, at least this is one story to which Kushner’s father-in-law can confidently and correctly refer as “fake news.”
Except maybe the part about the trampoline, of course. I mean, who doesn’t like a little good trampoline porn?
Image © Michael Sult.
