A number of private citizens who signed up for White House news alerts on the official White House website woke up this morning with a nice New Year’s message… from senior White House political adviser David Axelrod‘s Chicago-based consulting firm. You can see the greeting here.
The e-mail holiday message raises questions about how Axelrod’s firm got the email addresses. “I didn’t sign up for anything with the Axelrod firm, so I don’t know why I’m getting an e-card from them,” says a Republican PR consultant based in Los Angeles. “The only thing I’ve signed up for were White House alerts, and I’m not on any Democrat Party e-mail lists.”
The White House came under fire earlier this year for launching a program to collect personal online information about visitors to the White House website, and then using that data to send pro-Obama Administration propaganda to them. E-mails under the name of Axelrod at that time garnered the bulk of the attention, and now it appears that Axelrod is again using White House-collected e-mails, this time for personal business purposes.