‘No attempt to hide,’ Ivanka Trump defends use of private email for White House work
Her father, President Donald Trump, said the emails did not have classified information like those of former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
Ivanka Trump, daughter and senior adviser to United States President Donald Trump, on Wednesday defended using her private email for official White House correspondence. In an interview to ABC News, Ivanka Trump said the emails sent from her private account were archived and none of them contained classified information.
“All of my emails are stored and preserved. There were no deletions,” she said. “There is no attempt to hide.”
The development came after the president on Tuesday admitted that Ivanka Trump used her personal email for official work during the beginning of his administration. However, he claimed the mails were not “classified” like those of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“Just so you understand, early and for a little period of time, Ivanka did some emails,” Donald Trump had said. “They weren’t classified like Hillary Clinton. They weren’t deleted like Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t doing that to hide her emails.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2016 had cleared Clinton after an inquiry into her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. The FBI had announced the probe 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.
Ivanka Trump on Wednesday claimed her situation did not resemble Clinton’s at all. “There’s no equivalency to what my father’s spoken about,” she said.
According to media reports, Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides using a personal account, many of which were in contravention of federal records rules. However, she claimed that there was no restriction on using personal email. “In fact, we are instructed that if we receive an email to our personal account that could relate to government work, you simply just forward it to your government account so it can be archived,” she said.