According to a new report from The Washington Post, Ivanka Trump violated federal records rules by using her personal email account to send hundreds of emails last year.
The report alleges that Ivanka sent the emails to White House aides, Cabinet members, and her personal assistants.
Her email activities were uncovered by White House ethics officials as they reviewed records from the fall of 2017 in response to a public records lawsuit. The review found that Ivanka discussed official government business while using her private email account.
From The Washington Post:
White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.
The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Trump, who feared that his daughter’s practices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton, an issue he made a focus of his 2016 campaign. Trump attacked his Democratic challenger as untrustworthy and dubbed her “Crooked Hillary” for using a personal email account as secretary of state.
White House aides were reportedly stunned by Ivanka’s response when she was confronted about her email practices, in which she allegedly said that she wasn’t familiar with rules surrounding personal email use.
A spokesperson for Ivanka’s attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, said that none of her messages contained classified information.
“While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family,” spokesperson Peter Mirijanian said.
“Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no emails were ever deleted,” Mirijanian added, seeking to clarify that Ivanka’s email practices were different than Hillary Clinton’s — a subject Donald Trump repeatedly hammered home as a candidate in the 2016 election. As Wapo points out, Clinton relied solely on a private email system as secretary of state, bypassing government servers entirely.
Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server was a major talking point in the 2016 campaign and was used by Trump as a constant line of attack, sparking chants of “lock her up” during campaign rallies.
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