Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz said White House adviser and first daughter Ivanka Trump should be saved from scrutiny over her use of a private email account for government business, shooting down criticism as hypocritical “partisan bickering.”
“I think it’s hypocrisy on parade,” Dershowitz said during an interview Tuesday on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” program. “Each side uses whatever arguments they can to help and bolster their partisan position.”
The Washington Post reported Monday that Trump used a personal Microsoft email account with an “ijkfamily.com” domain to communicate hundreds of times with fellow White House aides, Cabinet officials, and others about official government business, including policy work, in some cases violating federal records rules.
But Dershowitz shrugged off the story Tuesday as a “nonissue,” saying “everybody uses private emails.”
“We now have a list of probably a dozen people in public life who have used emails,” Dershowitz said. “Apparently Ivanka Trump used the emails only for scheduling purposes. There was no classified material. The emails are all preserved. It’s a nonissue. It’s just partisan bickering. We should not be criminalizing the use of private emails, whether by Hillary Clinton or by Ivanka Trump, and we should put that issue behind us.”
[Opinion: Ivanka’s emails are bad, but still not remotely comparable to Hillary’s]
President Trump lambasted Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign for her use of an unauthorized, private email server during her time as secretary of state, which eventually led to the chant “lock her up” becoming commonplace at his campaign rallies.
Peter Mirijanian, the spokesperson for Ivanka Trump’s ethics lawyer Abbe Lowell, on Monday downplayed the appearance of any wrongdoing and comparisons to Clinton.
“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 wrote in a statement.
“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,” Mirijanian added.
