Emails benign, Ivanka Trump contends

WASHINGTON — In a television interview broadcast Wednesday, Ivanka Trump defended her use of a private email account while working in her father’s White House last year and dismissed comparisons between her situation and that of Hillary Clinton.

“People who want to see it as the same see it as the same,” Trump, the president’s eldest daughter and a White House senior adviser, told ABC News. But she insisted that “there really is no equivalency.”

Senior Republicans and Democrats in Congress have vowed to investigate Trump’s communications after a

Washington Post report this month that she 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.

The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Donald Trump, who feared that his daughter’s practices bore similarities to those of Clinton, who used a personal email server while secretary of state during President Barack Obama’s administration. As a candidate, Trump repeatedly criticized Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign for her email practices, prompting campaign audiences to chant, “Lock her up!”

Ivanka Trump told ABC that she had forwarded any relevant email sent to her personal account to her government account in accordance with the Presidential Records Act and that the emails in question contained no classified information.

“All of my emails that relate to any form of government work, which was mainly scheduling and logistics and managing the fact that I have a home life and a work life, are all part of the public record. They’re all stored on the White House system. So everything has been preserved. Everything has been archived. There just is no equivalency between the two things.”

“All of my emails are stored and preserved,” she added. “There were no deletions. There is no attempt to hide. There’s no equivalency to what my father’s spoken about.”

Her comments largely echoed those of President Trump, who told reporters last week that his daughter “wasn’t doing anything to hide her emails.”

In a statement earlier this month, a spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s lawyer 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.

In the ABC interview, Ivanka Trump also said she and her family have nothing to fear from the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

“I know the facts as they relate to me and my family, and so I have nothing to be concerned about,” she said.

Asked whether Mueller’s investigation should be allowed to continue, Ivanka Trump said: “I think it should reach its conclusion. I think it’s been a long time that this has been ongoing, but I want it to be done in a way in which nobody could question that it was hurried or rushed.”

In recent days, President Trump has repeatedly criticized Mueller. In a tweet on Tuesday, Trump called him a “conflicted prosecutor gone rogue.”

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