First daughter and senior White House advisor Ivanka Trump used a personal email account for government business, The Washington Post reported Monday.
“Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence,” The Post reported.
“Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump’s personal emails — and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. Trump said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction,” they added.
Abbe Lowell, Ivanka’s personally attorney, issued a statement through his spokesperson, Peter Mirijanian.
“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,” he claimed.
The emails were uncovered via a public records request filed by liberal watchdog group American Oversight.
During the 2016, Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server for official work was one of the defining issues.
At rally after rally, Trump supporters would chant, “lock her up” to demand Clinton be jailed for the practice.
“There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign,” American Oversight executive director Austin Evers said.
“There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better,” Evers noted.
When Trump’s daughter began working in the White House, she pledged to comply “with all ethics rules.”