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Donald Trump made it clear at the beginning of his campaign that he wasn’t going to follow the normal rules or tone of politics. We’re keeping track of all the ways his presidency veers from the norm in terms of policy and rhetoric.



DAY 347 Jan. 2

The election was in 2016, and 2017 was a long, long year. Welcome to 2018, where President Donald still has questions about Hillary Clinton’s email.

Trump called for the Justice Department, which he said was part of the “deep state,” to investigate Huma Abedin, one of Clinton’s top aides, for having reportedly sent State Department passwords to her personal Yahoo email account. The Daily Caller, a conservative publication that Trump reads regularly, published a report late on New Year’s Day that says that Abedin had violated State Department protocol, allowing her passwords to be claimed in the Yahoo hack of 2013, which compromised some 3 billion of the email service's accounts. The information was auctioned off by a collective in Eastern Europe.

And though Trump runs the government, he’s still suggesting that the “deep state” is really in charge. The term “deep state” refers to the entrenched, bureaucratic, conspiratorial forces that are, Trump suggests, wielding considerable power within the government that he leads.

The emails in question, found on Abedin’s soon-to-be ex-husband Anthony Weiner’s laptop. were released by the State Department on Friday.

The “sailors pictures on the submarines” Trump’s likely referring to here is another throwback to 2016: It refers to a U.S. Navy sailor who pleaded guilty to snapping a couple of photos of a classified part of a submarine. He was sentenced to six months home confinement.

Trump, in the tweet, suggested that the two incidents were comparable, and appeared to be calling for jail time for Abedin, because her failure to follow security protocol was similar to the Navy sailor’s. The sailor received a sentence of one year in prison as well as six months' home confinement.

CORRECTION Jan. 2, 5:12 p.m.: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that a U.S. Navy sailor had not received jail time for photographing classified areas of a submarine. The sailor did in fact receive a year-long prison sentence, as well as 6 months of home confinement.

— Alex Lubben