House to probe Ivanka Trump’s alleged email violations
WASHINGTON — The House Oversight Committee plans to investigate whether Ivanka Trump violated federal law by using a personal email account for government business, the panel’s incoming chairman, Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said Tuesday.
In a statement, Cummings said the committee launched a bipartisan investigation last year into White House officials’ use of personal email accounts, but the White House did not provide the requested information.
“We need those documents to ensure that Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and other officials are complying with federal records laws and there is a complete record of the activities of this administration,” Cummings said.
In what appeared to be an acknowledgment of the potential risk of a backlash against Democrats for aggressively probing the Trump administration, Cummings also emphasized that his focus upon becoming chairman of the committee will be to address the everyday issues impacting Americans.
“My goal is to prevent this from happening again — not to turn this into a spectacle the way Republicans went after Hillary Clinton,” he said.
House Republicans created a special committee to investigate the deadly 2012 attacks on U.S. facilities in Benghazi, Libya, and it was that panel that uncovered Clinton’s use of a personal email server for government business during her tenure as secretary of state under President Barack Obama.
Republicans excoriated Clinton’s use of personal email during her 2016 bid for president, prompting an FBI investigation that found that she had been “extremely careless” but that there was no intention to violate laws on handling classified information.
During the years-long Benghazi panel’s investigation, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., had acknowledged the political impact, saying the committee’s inquiry hurt Clinton’s poll numbers.
The Washington Post contacted representatives for all of the Republicans still in office who served on the Benghazi committee or as chairmen of the Oversight and Government Reform committee about Trump’s email use. Of those, only one — a spokesman for Rep. Susan Brooks, R-Ind. — replied: “No comment.”
Ivanka Trump first used her personal email to contact Cabinet officials in early 2017, before she joined the White House as an unpaid senior adviser, according to emails obtained by American Oversight and first reported by Newsweek.
When she joined the White House, Trump pledged to comply “with all ethics rules.” But she continued to occasionally use her personal email in her official capacity, people familiar with an administration review of her email use told The Washington Post.
In a statement Monday, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, said that the first daughter’s email use was different than that of Clinton, who had a private email server in the basement of her Chappaqua, New York, home. At one point, an archive of thousands of Clinton’s emails was deleted by a computer specialist amid a congressional investigation.