Ivanka Trump’s email use found to resemble Clinton’s

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. 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 his daughter’s practices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton, an issue the president made a focus of his 2016 campaign. Trump dubbed “Crooked Hillary” as untrustworthy for using a personal email account as secretary of state.

Some aides were taken aback by Ivanka Trump’s 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.

Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, acknowledged the president’s daughter occasionally used her private email before she was briefed on the rules. And he said her email use was different than Trump that of Clinton, who had a private email server in her home in Chappaqua, New York. 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,” he said.

Clinton also said she was unaware of or misunderstood the rules. Clinton relied solely on a private email system as secretary of state, bypassing government servers entirely.

Austin Evers, executive director of the liberal watchdog American Oversight, said it strains credulity that Trump’s daughter did not know that government officials should not use private emails for official business.