Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails to White House aides and Cabinet officials in violation of federal rules, even after her father spent much of his presidential campaign demanding Hillary Clinton be “locked up” for the same thing.
The Washington Post reported Monday that White House ethics officials discovered that President Trump’s daughter and adviser had been sending emails to at least five federal agencies from her personal account in 2017.
According to The Post, aides were “alarmed” and “startled by the volume” of the emails and “taken aback” when she said she was not “familiar” with some of the rules despite having lived through the 2016 news cycle.
A spokesman said that Ivanka stopped using the personal email after she was briefed on the rules and added that the emails did not contain any classified information.
“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,” the spokesman said.
The use of a private email account may violate the Presidential Records Act, which mandates that all White House communications are preserved.
Watchdogs cry hypocrisy: “There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign,” American Oversight head Austin Evers told The Post. “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.”
“I’m disappointed — although not entirely surprised — that this administration disregarded clear laws that they more than anyone should have been aware of,” he added.
Attorney defends: Harvard law professor and frequent Trump defender Alan Dershowitz dismissed the news as a “non-issue” in an appearance on Fox News.
“Look, everybody uses private emails,” he said. “We now have a list of probably a dozen people in public life who have used [private] emails. Apparently Ivanka Trump used the emails only for scheduling purposes. There was no classified material. The emails are all preserved.”
“It’s just partisan bickering. We should not be criminalizing the use of private emails — whether by Hillary Clinton or by Ivanka Trump. And we should put that issue behind us,” he added.
Fellow Trump supporter Rick Santorum said it was a non-issue because Ivanka, a White House adviser, is “not a political figure.”
"To ignore the obvious differences here is, I think, a little hypocritical," Santorum said. "Hillary Clinton went out an established her own server in full knowledge that what she was doing was wrong, number one."
"Number two, she — this was a political person who had political aspirations, who was doing things in her own interest as a political figure, as opposed to Ivanka, who is not a political figure, who is the daughter of the president, yet she was not the Secretary of State dealing with a variety of very sensitive and classified information," he added.
House Dems to investigate: A Democratic congressional staffer told The Hill that the House Oversight Committee will “continue our investigation of the presidential records act and federal records act, and we want to know if Ivanka complied with the law.”
