But Her Emails

Ken AshfordClinton Email Faux Scandal, Trump & AdministrationLeave a Comment

It is hard to fathom how stupid Ivanka Trump must be. To do this after her father railed against Hillary Clinton for so long….

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.

White House ethics officials learned of Trump’s repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.

The discovery alarmed some advisers to President Trump, who feared that his daughter’s prac­tices bore similarities to the personal email use of Hillary Clinton, an issue he made a focus of his 2016 campaign. He attacked his Democratic challenger as untrustworthy and dubbed her “Crooked Hillary” for using a personal email account as secretary of state.

Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump’s personal emails — and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. She said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction.

The White House referred requests for comment to Ivanka Trump’s attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell.

Faced with a Washington Post report that Ivanka Trump had regularly used a private email account to conduct government business in 2017, the explanation from her side went like this: She didn’t know that was wrong!

I’m not kidding.

Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka Trump lawyer Abbe Lowell, said “While transitioning into government, until the White House provided her the same guidance they had to others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her private account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family,” Mirijanian said.

How. Is. That. Possible.

How could Ivanka Trump have not known — even prior to the White House providing her “guidance” — that using a private email account to conduct official business was a giant no-no?

As you may remember, the central attack by Donald Trump against Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign centered on her decision to use a private email account and server while serving as secretary of state. Trump insisted that Clinton was not being fully transparent about why she used a private email server for government business — and used that as a foothold into a broader questioning of whether the former secretary of state could be trusted with the nation’s top job.

“How can Hillary run the economy when she can’t even send emails without putting entire nation at risk,” Trump tweeted in June 2016. A month later, he tweeted this: “The invention of email has proven to be a very bad thing for Crooked Hillary in that it has proven her to be both incompetent and a liar!”

The press, by the way, is not covering the story with the same breathless-ness as Hillary in the 2016 election.

Oh, well. Another day in Trumpworld.