Ivanka Trump in email violation
Personal account use against federal rules
WASHINGTON — Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence.
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 Donald 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.
Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump’s personal emails — and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. Trump said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction.
The White House referred requests for comment to Ivanka Trump’s attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell.
In a statement, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Lowell, acknowledged that the president’s daughter occasionally used her private email before she was briefed on the rules, but he said 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,” he said in a statement.
Mirijanian said Ivanka Trump turned over all her governmentrelated emails months ago so they could be stored permanently with other White House records.
And he stressed that her email use was different than that of Clinton, who had a private email server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, N.Y. At one point, an archive of thousands of Clinton’s emails was deleted by a computer specialist amid a congressional investigation.
“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 said.
Like Trump, Clinton also said she was unaware of or misunderstood the rules. However, Clinton relied solely on a private email system as secretary of state, bypassing government servers entirely.
Both Trump and Clinton relied on their personal attorneys to review their private emails and determine which messages should be retained as government records.