President Donald Trump, who spent years demanding that Hillary Clinton be “locked up” for using a private email server for government business, denied that his daughter Ivanka did anything wrong by using her private email account for government business.
On Monday, The Washington Post reported that Ivanka sent hundreds of official emails to aides and Cabinet agencies using her private email account, possibly in violation of a federal law that requires all White House communications to be preserved in an official account.
President Trump defended his daughter against allegations that what she did is exactly what Hillary Clinton did.
"Just so you understand, early and for a little period of time, Ivanka did some emails," Trump told reporters at the White House Tuesday.
"They weren't classified like Hillary Clinton. They weren't deleted like Hillary Clinton," he continued. "She wasn't doing that to hide her emails."
"The Presidential Record, they're all in the Presidential Record, There was no hiding,” he added. “You're talking about a whole different -- you're talking about all fake news. There was no deletion, there was no nothing. Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails. She had a server in the basement. That's the real story."
Clinton said her 33,000 deleted emails were not government-related and she deleted them because they were personal in nature.
GOP lawmakers demand an explanation: Democrats are already planning to investigate the email use when they take over the House in January but outgoing Republican Rep. Trey Gowdy, who chairs the House Oversight Committee, has sent a letter to the White House asking for information about Ivanka’s use of a private email account, Politico reports. Wisconsin Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, who sits on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, also joined Democrat Claire McCaskill in asking for more information about Ivanka’s email use.
Trump family puts info at risk: “Before Ivanka Trump, it was Kushner who used private email in an apparent violation of federal records laws,” wrote The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake. “But that’s not all. President Trump has reportedly shunned security concerns by continuing to use his personal cellphone. He has done this even as he has been told that China and Russia are monitoring the phone — exactly what he worried about when it came to such countries potentially hacking Clinton’s server. At the least, you’d think a guy who was so concerned about records laws and cybersecurity would take more care.”
