Hillary Clinton blasted the ‘hypocrisy’ of the Trump administration after senior White House officials were found to be using private emails to do business – after her own email practices helped bring down her presidential campaign.
Clinton commented on the email revelations Monday night, after it was reported that six top White House officials – including the president’s daughter and son-in-law – had used private email to conduct business in at least some instances.
‘The hypocrisy of this administration, who knew there was no real scandal, who knew that there was no basis for all their hyperventilating. Republican members of Congress who politicized the deaths in Benghazi,’ Clinton told Sirius radio, the Huffington Post reported.
‘NO REAL SCANDAL’: Hillary Clinton said it was the ‘height of hypocrisy’ for Trump officials to be using private email accounts
‘No, we’re finding with the latest revelations ― they didn’t mean any of it. It’s just the height of hypocrisy,’ she said.
Clinton also said Republicans in Congress, who hounded her over her own email usage, were not taking the issue seriously – although the top Oversight Committee Republican Trey Gowdy and ranking Democrat Elijah Cummings on Monday asked the White House to reveal officials who used private email.
‘It is something that if they were sincere about I think you’d have Republican members of Congress calling for an investigation,’ Clinton said. ‘I haven’t heard that yet.’
Donald Trump made Clinton’s deleted emails a centerpiece of his presidential campaign
A Florida delegate holds up a sign that reads ‘Lock Her Up!’ prior to the start of the third day of the Republican National Convention on July 20, 2016 at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump received the number of votes needed to secure the party’s nomination
One distinction Clinton failed to draw was that her own private email use took place on a tremendous scale. It was the only account she used during her years as secretary of state.
Clinton had her email on a private server that was run out of her home. As the nation’s top diplomat, she discussed highly sensitive information, and government investigators found email marked classified in her system.
At least six senior current and former White House officials used private email to conduct government-related business, it was reported on Monday.
One day after it was first reported that President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner used his personal email account while working as an employee of the federal government, current and former officials told The New York Times that at least five other colleagues did the same.
Ivanka Trump, Kushner’s wife and the president’s daughter, used a personal email account to communicate with government officials in February when she had an informal White House role, it was revealed Monday.
It was also learned Monday that former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon; top economic adviser Gary Cohn; another top policy adviser, Stephen Miller; and former chief of staff Reince Priebus also corresponded using their private email account.
Ivanka Trump (first row right to left), Jared Kushner, and Gary Cohn attend a ceremony at the White House marking the September 11 attacks. They are three of at least six senior White House aides who have used a private email account to conduct government business
Former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus (left) and former chief strategist Stephen Bannon (right) also used their personal email account during the first few months of their time in the Trump administration
Stephen Miller (seen above during an August 2 news briefing at the White House) is a senior policy adviser to the president
The news is significant considering the president’s withering criticism of Hillary Clinton for her use of a private home email server during the campaign.
Both Trump relatives are key White House advisors who accepted unpaid roles in the administration.
Government officials are legally required to conduct official business through a government-issued email so that the communications can be made available to the public.
Officials are legally permitted to use a private email account, but only if work-related messages received and sent are then forwarded to their government-issued addresses so that they could be preserved.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a rally at Ladd-Peebles Stadium on August 21, 2015 in Mobile, Alabama. Trump regularly brought up Clinton’s emails during the campaign. It was revealed Sunday and Monday that six Trump officials used private email to conduct business
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump moved to Washington to join the Trump administration after Donald Trump won election
In Ivanka Trump’s case, she communicated with Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon using the private account on Feb. 28th, Newsweek reported, citing the nonprofit American Oversight.
The emails revolved around her ‘women’s entrepreneurship’ agenda, which the first daughter has made central to her role.
She requested that McMahon – a major Trump donor and former World Wrestling Entertainment executive – to help ‘explore opportunities to collaborate’ on ‘women’s entrepreneurship’ issues.
She went by the name ‘Ivanka Kushner’ instead of Ivanka Trump in the email.
The online activity came before she officially became an unpaid federal government employee, subject to restrictions on her activities.
‘Yet again we see that there’s one rule for the Trump family and another for everyone else,’ American Oversight director Austin Evers told the publication.
Kushner used a private account before President Trump took office and continued using it through the summer.
‘Fewer than a hundred emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House,’ his attorney Abbe Lowell said Sunday following a Politico report on his email use. He said they usually happened after someone initiated the exchange by emailing his personal account.
ROLE MODEL: Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, accompanied by her husband former President Bill Clinton, concedes the presidential election at the New Yorker Hotel on November 9, 2016 in New York City. Ivanka Trump was revealed to have a personal email account to contact a government official under the name ‘Ivanka Kushner’
A person who reviewed them said they didn’t contain classified information, without revealing how that was determined. Many were news articles being forwarded, according to Lowell.
Donald Trump savaged Clinton during the campaign after it was revealed she conducted all of her State Department business from a private account that experts said could have been vulnerable to intrusion.
He repeatedly railed against ‘Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails,’ and called for her to be prosecuted. FBI Director James Comey ultimately announced a decision not to prosecute Clinton in July 2016.
White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said to her knowledge Kushner’s private email was used in ‘very limited’ circumstances.
She indicated it was not within typical White House policy. ‘We get instructed on this one pretty regularly,’ she said.
The president’s daughter continues to play an important public role, as was made evident during introductions for an event on science education Monday.
‘It’s a great pleasure to be here with Secretary DeVos, Secretary Acosta, and Ivanka,’ the president said at the top of his remarks.
Later, he added: ‘I’ve asked Ivanka to lead up the White House efforts on workforce development, and the initiative today is a critical part of that endeavor. Have you seen Ivanka? Do you know Ivanka?’ the president asked an audience. ‘Where is Ivanka? There’s Ivanka,’ he said when locating her.