Ivanka Trump, used a private email account to send hundreds of emails to her assistants, as well as to White House aides and Cabinet officials. However, it has not yet been alleged that Ivanka transmitted any classified information through this private email account.
Ivanka is a senior adviser to her father, President Donald Trump.
A White House review has found that Ivanka used an email account from a private domain owned by her and her husband, Jared Kushner, for official administration business for most of 2017. She reportedly stopped using this email account after she was told that it was against the rules. Ivanka has insisted that she was not aware that she was breaking any rules by using a private email.
According to copies posted by the liberal watchdog American Oversight who obtained the emails via FOIA request, Ivanka sent emails from this address to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos.
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka's attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, said:
While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family.
The spokesman also said:
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.
President Trump has been critical of Hillary Clinton for using a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State.
“The invention of email has proven to be a very bad thing for Crooked Hillary in that it has proven her to be both incompetent and a liar!” he tweeted in July of 2016, just after the Republican National Convention officially named him the GOP presidential nominee. During this campaign, Ivanka acted as a surrogate for her father.
Admittedly, Ivanka is not Secretary of State. Nor, her lawyers insist, were any of the emails she sent classified, and none of them were deleted before they could be turned over to the proper authorities. Ivanka had her personal attorneys decide which emails needed to be turned over to the government, something Hillary also did.
Ivanka's legal team has claimed that the emails on her personal account mostly dealt with “logistics and scheduling concerning her family,” and said that no emails had been deleted. Hillary had claimed that the tens of thousands of emails she had deleted were also personal, and limited to planning her daughter Chelsea's wedding, family vacations, and yoga routines.
Unlike Ivanka, Hillary had used not only a private email account, but a private server which had been kept at her home in Chappaqua, New York. Although former FBI Director James Comey would refuse to pursue charges against her, it was later revealed that emails Hillary had sent contained information that was classified at the time it were sent.
While there is nothing yet to indicate that any of Ivanka's emails came close to compromising national security, the optics certainly are not great for the White House.
