Political news website Politico reports that the Trump transition efforts are using private email systems to communicate and plan President-elect Donald Trump’s return to the White House.

We believe the use of private email systems by public officials to conduct the responsibilities of their offices is wrong: It erodes the avenues by which the public can hold officials to transparency and accountability and encourages skepticism about the motivations of duly elected officials.

We believed it was wrong four years ago, when we editorialized against the practice by the Secret Service during that presidential transition. We believed it was wrong eight to nine years ago, when the campaign of Democratic nominee and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced similar questions about her use of private email to potentially evade disclosure about how she performed as America’s top diplomat — a topic we, again, often addressed in our editorials in those days.

But at that juncture during the 2016 campaign, many didn’t agree with us about the importance of this issue. We recall that many Democrats nominated Clinton and supported her campaign without any reservations about her use of “off-the-grid” email. As we further recall it, the very idea that such questions and concerns were valid was routinely mocked and derided by Clinton’s supporters. And in the aftermath of her defeat in the electoral college that year, we recall a lot of speculation that her loss was due to misogyny or chauvinism — or even an “unfair” preoccupation by the media and the FBI with this very matter.

And so, while we will continue to believe that President-elect Trump’s transition team should use the government-operated email services to preserve records for future scrutiny by the public — by, in essence, their employers in a democratic republic — we also are perplexed by criticisms of the transition teams coming specifically from the activists of the Democratic Party and from the more partisan of political pundits and news outlets.

They, after all, decided eight years ago that such disregard for transparency was acceptable. It should not surprise them that it would be acceptable for their opponents as well.