Democrats have pounced on the revelation that Ivanka Trump used a private email server for business related to the White House and will investigate the first daughter, who serves as an adviser to President Donald Trump.
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which will be led by Democrats next year in the new Congress, plans to examine Trump’s actions.
‘We want to know if Ivanka complied with the law,’ a Democratic aide told DailyMail.com on Tuesday.
Democrats have pounced on the revelation that Ivanka Trump used a private email server for business related to the White House
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, likely to be led by Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings (left) in 2019, plans to investigate her email use and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal (right) said the first daughter’s actions should be examined
The panel, likely to be led by Maryland Democrat Elijah Cummings in 2019, plans to revive an investigation into the White House’s use of private emails, which is a possible violation of federal records law.
The powerful committee has investigative oversight of the executive branch and the power to subpoena.
‘We plan to continue our investigation of the Presidential Records Act and Federal Records Act,’ the aide said.
And Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said on Tuesday there ‘should be some kind of investigative effort.’
Blumenthal, who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would have oversight on an investigation, told CNN the first daughter’s actions should be examined.
‘There is no way that she had no knowledge of the rules,’ he said.
‘But really there is a larger story here which is the mixing of public and private as with her clothing brand and her public position, the blending and mixing of e-mails on her private account, her public account. It raises the issue of whether there has been anything improper. There should be some kind of investigative effort,’ he noting, adding it should be done ‘through the Office of Government Ethics or through the Congress.’
He pointed out: ‘Congress can hold the president accountable for putting himself above the law, which is essentially in a sense what Ivanka Trump has done with these e-mails.’
The first daughter has even come under fire from fellow Republicans.
‘It’s hypocritical and certainly it looks bad and I’m sure that the media will have a field day with it today,’ Marc Short, who had served as legislative director in the Trump White House, told CNN.
And former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci agreed with that assessment.
‘Certainly I think it’s hypocritical,’ he told CNN.
The White House declined to offer an official comment on the allegations against the president’s daughter.
And Larry Kudlow, the president’s chief economic adviser, defended her in a briefing with reporters on Tuesday morning.
‘I think the absolute world of Ivanka Trump. She is a brilliant woman and a really important adviser to the president, period,’ he said.
Trump used her personal email account to send hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, government officials and her assistants – most of which were in violation of federal rules, it was revealed on Monday by The Washington Post.
The revelation sparked immediate comparisons to Hillary Clinton, who famously used a private email server while secretary of state that became subject of a federal investigation and the target of criticism from President Donald Trump, who dubbed her ‘Crooked Hillary’ and said he would lock her up for it.
But Ivanka Trump’s lawyer’s office slammed any comparisons to Clinton.
‘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,’ Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Trump’s attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, to The Washington Post.
Former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci said Ivanka Trump’s actions were ‘hypocritical’
The revelation of private email use prompted immediate comparisons between Trump and Hillary Clinton
Clinton had denied having classified emails on her private server.
‘I did not send classified material, and I did not receive any material that was marked or designated classified,’ she said on the campaign trail in August 2015.
The FBI investigation later found that 110 messages contained information that was classified at the time it was sent.
White House ethics officials learned of Ivanka Trump’s personal email use when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit, sources familiar with the matter told The Post.
Trump said she was not familiar with all the rules.
The private email account came from a domain she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.
They set up personal emails with the domain ‘ijkfamily.com’ through a Microsoft system in December 2016, after Trump won the presidency and the couple was preparing to move to Washington D.C.
Mirijanian said her use was mainly around her logistics and her family’s schedule. The couple, both of whom serve as advisers to President Trump, have three children.
‘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,’ he said in a statement.
He noted she had turned over all her government-related emails months ago so they could be stored permanently with other White House records as part of requirements by federal law under the Presidential Records Act.
Austin Evers, executive director of the liberal watchdog group American Oversight, whose record requests sparked the White House discovery, said it difficult to believe she would not know the rules.
‘There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign,’ he told The Post. ‘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.’
American Oversight wrote to the top members of the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday that ‘it is incumbent on Congress to investigate this matter immediately.’
‘The parallels between Ms. Trump’s conduct and that of Secretary Clinton are inescapable,’ Evers wrote in the letter. ‘In both her use of personal email and post-discovery preservation efforts, Ms. Trump appears to have done exactly what Secretary Clinton did – conduct over which President Trump and many members of Congress regularly lambasted Secretary Clinton and which, they asserted, demonstrated her unfitness for office.’
Those close Ivanka Trump said she never intended to use her private email to hide her government work and only used her private email less than a hundred times, mainly to reply to those who emailed her.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner set up personal emails with the domain ‘ijkfamily.com’ through a Microsoft system after Trump was elected president
Ivanka Trump’s lawyer’s office slammed any comparisons to Hillary Clinton
President Trump attacked Clinton’s email server during the 2016 campaign as his supporters shouted ‘Lock her up’
After she told White House lawyers she was unaware that she was breaking any email rules, they discovered that she had not been receiving White House updates and reminders to all staff about prohibited use of private email, sources told the newspaper.
Revelations about Clinton’s email server led to an FBI investigation, which ultimately concluded she had been reckless but had not broken the law.
Clinton had a private email server in the basement of her Chappaqua, N.Y., home. Thousands of her emails were deleted by a computer specialist amid a congressional investigation.
She, like Ivanka Trump, had said she didn’t understand the rules.
President Trump made Clinton’s email use a favorite campaign weapon in the race against her, leading crowds of supporters to chant ‘lock her up.’
Even after he defeated her and won the White House he publicly asked on multiple occasions and in tweets why he was the target of an investigation on whether or not his campaign colluded with Russia while Clinton was not being investigated.
‘I look at what’s happening with the Justice Department, why aren’t they going after Hillary Clinton with her emails and with her dossier and the kind of money? I don’t know,’ President Trump said in a radio interview last November.
‘Hillary Clinton’s Emails, many of which are Classified Information, got hacked by China,’ the president tweeted in August without providing any evidence.
After discovering her private email use in September 2017, White House lawyers relied on Lowell to review which were personal and which were official business.
The White House Counsel’s Office did not have access to her personal account.
Lowell forwarded emails that he had determined were related to official business to Ivanka Trump’s government account, sources told The Post.