Ivanka Trump explains personal email use

WASHINGTON—Ivanka Trump defended her use of a personal email account for White House business in an interview with ABC News on Tuesday. The Washington Post reported last week that the president’s daughter who is also a White House adviser sent hundreds of emails in 2017 to aides and Cabinet officials about government business, which is in violation of federal records rules. The White House ethics office discovered Trump’s usage last fall. A spokesman for the first daughter’s lawyer last week said Trump used her private email address before she was briefed on the rules. She promptly turned over her emails so they could be stored with other White House records, in contrast with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while working in the Obama administration. “Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her home or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no emails were ever deleted,” Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Trump’s ethics attorney, said in a statement.

During the interview with ABC News, Trump reiterated that her usage should not be compared to Clinton’s, saying there was “no equivalency.” Clinton used a personal email account with a private email server set up in the basement of her New York home and deleted thousands of emails before handing over information to investigators. The FBI later discovered classified information in some of the emails from the private server. “All of my emails are stored and preserved. There were no deletions,” Trump said. She also said White House staff were instructed to simply forward any emails relating to government work received on personal email accounts to a government email account so they could be archived.

Congress plans to investigate Trump’s personal email usage next year and has asked the White House to provide more information. The Presidential Records Act requires all official White House records be preserved as a permanent archive. Using personal emails for federal business can violate the act and increase the risk that government information could be hacked. Trump said she is not worried about the findings of the probe.