Ivanka Trump used a personal account to send emails about government affairs
Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails in 2017 to White House aides, cabinet officials and her personal assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with an examination of correspondence from the White House.
White House ethics officials learned of the repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails collected last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit.
That review revealed that for much of 2017, she often discussed or broadcast official White House business using a private email account with a domain she shared with her husband, Jared Kushner.
The discovery alarmed some aides to President Trump, who feared their daughter's practices bore similarities to Hillary Clinton's personal use of email, a topic she focused on her 2016 campaign.
Trump attacked his Democratic challenger as unreliable and dismissively dubbed her "crooked Hillary" for using a personal email account as secretary of state.
Some attendees were surprised by the volume of personal emails from Ivanka Trump, and were surprised by her response when asked about the practice. Trump said she was unfamiliar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction.
The White House forwarded the requests for comment to Ivanka Trump's attorney and ethics attorney Abbe Lowell.
In a statement, Peter Mirijanian, a Lowell spokesman, acknowledged that the president's daughter occasionally used her private email before being informed of the rules, but said none of her messages contained classified information.
“During the transition to government, after she was given an official account, but until the White House gave her the same guidance they had given to others who had started before her, Mrs. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistical and planning purposes related to his family, ”he said in a statement.
Mirijanian said Ivanka Trump handed over all of her government-related emails months ago so they could be permanently stored with other White House records, emphasizing that her use of email was different from Clinton's, who had a mail server. private email in the basement of his home in Chappaqua, New York.
At one point, a computer specialist deleted a file of thousands of Clinton emails in the middle of a congressional investigation.
Mrs. "Trump did not create a private server at her home or office, classified information was never included, the account was never transferred to the Trump Organization, and emails were never deleted," Mirijanian said.
Like Trump, Clinton also said he was unaware or did not understand the rules. However, Clinton relied solely on a private email system as secretary of state, avoiding government servers entirely.
Both Trump and Clinton relied on their personal attorneys to review their private emails and determine which messages should be kept as government records.
Clinton originally said that none of the messages she sent or received were defined as "classified." The FBI later determined that 110 emails contained classified information at the time they were sent or received.
Austin Evers, executive director of the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, whose registration requests sparked the White House discovery, said he doubted Trump's daughter didn't know that government officials shouldn't use private emails for official business.
"There is the obvious hypocrisy, as her father relied on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of her campaign," Evers said. “There is no reasonable suggestion that she did not know. Clearly, everyone who joined the Trump administration should have been on high alert about the use of personal email. "
Ivanka Trump and her husband set up personal emails with the domain "ijkfamily.com" through a Microsoft system in December 2016 as they prepared to move to Washington so that Kushner could join the White House, according to people familiar with the agreement.
The couple's emails were previously checked by the Trump Organization to avoid security issues such as viruses, but were stored by Microsoft, the sources said.
Trump used her personal account to discuss government policy and official business less than 100 times, often responding to other administration officials who contacted her through her private email, according to people familiar with the review.
Another category of less important emails may also have violated the law of records: hundreds of messages related to her official work schedule and travel details that she sent herself to her personal assistants who looked after her children and the house, they said.
People close to Ivanka Trump said she never intended to use her private email to hide her government work.
After informing White House attorneys that he did not know he was breaking any email rules, they discovered that he had not received updates and reminders from the White House about the prohibited use of private email, according to people familiar with the situation.
Using personal emails for government business could violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires that all official White House communications and records be kept as a permanent file for each administration. It can also increase the risk that confidential government information could be mishandled or hacked, revealing government secrets and jeopardizing diplomatic relations and secret operations.
The revelations about Clinton's personal email system led to an FBI investigation into whether he had mishandled classified information.
The scandal marred Clinton throughout his campaign to reach the White House in 2016, which culminated in the controversial decision of then-FBI Director James B. Comey to hold a press conference a few months before the election to announce her conclusion that she had been reckless with government secrets, but that there was insufficient evidence that she had intended to break the law.
During the campaign, Donald Trump said the Democratic nominee "was on a scale of corruption that we have never seen before" and called her personal use of email "a bigger issue than Watergate."
Trump supporters still chant: "Imprison her!" at their rallies, and the president, nearly two years into her administration, continues to tweet about Clinton's emails.
"It's great news that the FBI ignored tens of thousands of emails from Crooked Hillary, many of which are VERY BAD," he wrote in August, referring to a Fox News story about claims that the bureau did not examine all of his emails. electronic. “She also gave false electoral information. I am sure that we will soon get to the bottom of all this corruption. At some point I will have to get involved! "
Ivanka Trump first used her personal email to contact Cabinet officials in early 2017, before joining the White House as a senior adviser without pay, according to emails obtained by American Oversight.
In late February 2017, she used her personal email to contact the head of Small Business Administration, Linda McMahon, and proposed that they meet to explore "opportunities to collaborate."
The following month, she sent an email to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, suggesting that her employees meet to discuss ways to collaborate on "workforce development / placement and K-12 STEM education."
While his messages were largely about the work of the administration, Trump was not bound by the White House records rules.
When he joined the White House on March 30, Trump pledged to abide by "all ethical rules," responding to complaints that his volunteer role gave him all the accesses and benefits of the White House, but none of the legal responsibilities or restrictions.
"Throughout this process, I have been working closely and in good faith with the White House attorney and my personal advice to address the unprecedented nature of my role," he said in a statement at the time.
But Trump continued to occasionally use his personal email in his official capacity, according to people familiar with the review.
His husband's use of personal emails for government work drew intense scrutiny when it was first reported by Politico last fall.
But Trump had used his personal email for official business more often, according to people familiar with the administration's review, a fact that remained a closely guarded secret within the White House.
"She was the worst offender in the White House," said a former senior US government official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the internal dynamics.
After discovering the extent of her email use in September 2017, White House attorneys relied on Lowell, Ivanka Trump's attorney, to help her review her emails to determine which were personal and which were official business. according to people.
The White House Law Office did not have access to her personal account and was unable to review them without invading her privacy and possibly violating privileged communications with her attorneys, people familiar with the review said.
After her review, Lowell forwarded the emails she had determined to be related to official business to the Ivanka Trump administration account, a move that she believed rectified any violations of the records law, they said.
Lowell's review found fewer than 1,000 personal emails in which Trump shared his official schedule and travel plans with her and her personal assistants, according to two people familiar with the review.
Separately, there were fewer than 100 emails in which Trump used her personal account to discuss official business with other administration officials.
