The Washington Post reports that Ivanka Trump used her personal email account to send hundreds of emails regarding government matters last year. Many of the emails violate federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence and were discovered recently by White House ethics officials who were reviewing emails gathered last year by five Cabinet agencies in response to a recent public records lawsuit.
The issue is increasingly scandalous due to its resemblance to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s personal emails, which were a major talking point throughout Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential election in which he dubbed her “Crooked Hillary.”
Trump reportedly claimed not to be familiar with many of the details regarding relevant rules, and the White House referred requests for comment to her attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell. Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Lowell, admitted to Trump using a personal email before being briefed on security policies, qualifying that none of her emails contained classified information.
In an effort to differentiate Trump from Clinton, Mirjanian qualified: “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. Clinton had relied on private email system as secretary of state, bypassing government servers entirely.
“There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign,” said Austin Evers, executive director of the liberal watchdog group American Oversight. “There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better. Clearly everyone joining the Trump administration should have been on high alert about personal email use.”
Fewer than 100 emails reportedly contained classified information, many of which were replies to other emails that came from other personal accounts. Ms. Trump pleads ignorance as Clinton did, but “Lock Her Up” chants still echo at Trump rallies.
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