Looking for a way out of this mess not to
harm Daddy
(Simple: Leave the White House)
Ivanka
Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides (from Washington
Post that follows, and from The Guardian below).
Trump-Kushner
also sent them to cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal
account, many of them in violation of federal records rules (effective following Watergate) according
to people familiar with a White House examination of her email correspondence.
White House ethics officials learned of her 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 also 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 claims she was not
familiar with some details of the rules.
My insert: From The Guardian from Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Democrat
member of the Senate judiciary committee, is calling for an investigation of
Ivanka Trump’s email use, either by the Office of Government Ethics or
Congress, saying in part: “There’s no way
that she had no knowledge of the rules.”
The White
House referred requests for comment to Ivanka Trump’s attorney and ethics
counsel, Abbe Lowell.
In a
statement, Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman
for Lowell, acknowledged that the president’s daughter occasionally used
her private email before she was briefed on the rules, but he said none of her
messages contained classified information,
adding in part:
“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.”
Mirijanian further said that Trump-Kushner turned over all
her government-related emails months ago so they could be stored permanently
with other White House records and he stressed that her email use was different
from that of Clinton, who had a
private email server in the basement of her home in Chappaqua, NY home. An archive of thousands of
Clinton’s emails was deleted by a computer specialist amid a congressional
investigation.
Mirijanian then said: “Ms.
Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified
information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump
Organization, and no emails were ever deleted.”
Like Trump,
Clinton also said she was unaware of or misunderstood the rules. However,
Clinton relied solely on a private email system as secretary of state,
bypassing government servers entirely. Both Trump and Clinton relied on their
personal attorneys to review their private emails and determine which messages
should be retained as government records.
Key note: Clinton originally said none of the messages she sent
or received were “marked classified.” The FBI later determined that
110 emails contained classified information at the time they were sent or
received and then they were retroactively marked classified.
Austin Evers, executive director of
the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, whose record requests sparked the White House
discovery, said it strained credulity that Trump’s daughter did not know that
government officials should not use private emails for official business and he
said:
“There’s the obvious hypocrisy that
her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his
campaign. There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better.
Clearly everyone joining the Trump administration should have been on high
alert about personal email use.”
The
following is from The Guardian in part: A senior Democrat has called for an investigation of
Ivanka Trump’s use of a personal email account for government business, an act
that has been criticized as hypocritical by allies and foes of her father’s
administration.
A White
House review of Trump’s emails showed that she used her personal email to
correspond with federal government staff, cabinet officials and her assistants
throughout much of 2017. Ethics officials uncovered hundreds of emails sent by
a domain Trump shares with her husband Jared Kushner, as the Washington Post
reported.
As noted above: Sen.
Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Democrat member of the Senate judiciary
committee, is calling for an investigation of Ivanka Trump’s email use, either
by the Office of Government Ethics or Congress, saying in part: “There’s no way that she had no knowledge of
the rules.”
Story continues at the links above
and below.
This
article from Vox.com – same subject.
Simple yet SOP for the GOP in these cases, and after
attacking DEMS savagely, I see once again their gross hypocrisy.
We shall see what else develops – but, don’t expect much
positive from President Trump on this issue.
Stay tuned and thanks for stopping by
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