United States President Donald Trump admitted on Tuesday that his daughter and senior adviser Ivanka Trump used her private email for official White House work during the beginning of his administration. However, he claimed the mails were not “classified” like those of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, CNN reported.
“Just so you understand, early and for a little period of time, Ivanka did some emails,” Donald Trump told reporters at the White House. “They weren’t classified like Hillary Clinton. They weren’t deleted like Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t doing that to hide her emails.”
In 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation had cleared Hillary Clinton after an inquiry into her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. The FBI had announced the investigation just weeks before the presidential election. The emails were a poll plank Trump consistently used ahead of the election, and though the FBI cleared Clinton, he continued to express confidence that she was guilty of mishandling information pertaining to national security.
The president insisted that Ivanka Trump’s email use was in accordance with US records retention laws. “The Presidential Record, they’re all in the Presidential Record,” Donald Trump said. “There was no hiding.” On the other hand, Donald Trump said Clinton, his Democratic opponent for the 2016 elections, had deleted 33,000 emails, and had a “server in the basement”.
Donald Trump’s admission came a day after The Washington Post reported that Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides using a personal account. Many of these emails were in contravention of federal records rules, the newspaper said. The discovery that Ivanka Trump used personal email for official work was made when the liberal watchdog group American Oversight obtained this correspondence.
Asked if he would allow Democrats in the US Congress to interview his daughter about the emails, the president said, “Ivanka can take care of herself.”
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for one of Donald Trump’s attorneys, said Ivanka Trump “sometimes used her private account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family”, USA Today reported.
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