Ivanka: I Didn’t Know You Couldn’t Use Personal Email For Official Business
Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails on government business, using a personal account, the Washington Post reported.
Trump, who serves as an unpaid White House senior advisor, sent the emails to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants, many of them in violation of federal records rules, the newspaper reported on Monday evening, citing sources it says are familiar with a White House review of her correspondence.
The review came in response to a public records lawsuit. It showed that during most of 2017 she discussed and sent emails about official White House business from a private email account that uses a domain she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner, a senior White House advisor.
Trump said she did not know the details of the records rules, the Post reported citing sources it said had knowledge of her reaction.
A spokesman for Trump’s attorney and ethics advisor Abbe Lowell told the newspaper that none of the emails contained classified information. He said the infractions occurred before Trump was briefed on the rules. He also said she turned over all her government-related emails months ago so they could be stored permanently with other White House records.
Ivanka Trump’s father, President Trump, during the 2016 presidential campaign slammed his opponent Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server in her home to send emails on government business, accusing her of “corruption” that was “bigger than Watergate.” He called her Crooked Hillary and led chants of “Lock her up!”
Politico reported last fall that Kushner was using personal email for government work, and later preserved his records to turn over to government officials.
According to the Post, Trump had used her personal email for official business far more frequently than known. An unnamed senior U.S. government official called her the “worst offender in the White House.” The extent of her email use was discovered in September 2017. Following the discovery, Lowell forwarded emails that he had determined were related to official business to Ivanka Trump’s government account.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
