Congressional Democrats are pouncing on the revelation that White House adviser Ivanka Trump used a private email account to discuss government business, with the president’s oldest daughter likely to come under scrutiny by investigators.
Democrats are poised to take the helm of House committees in the wake of the midterm elections, including the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, giving them the power to begin a litany of investigations aimed at the Trump administration.
An investigation into Ivanka Trump’s use of a private email address, revealed by the Washington Post on Monday, and whether she and others complied with federal law is expected to rank among them.
“There’s a larger story here, which is the mixing of public and private, and it’s with her clothing brand and her public position, the blending and mixing of emails on her private account and public account, and it raises the issue of whether there has been anything improper,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told CNN.
“There should be some kind of investigative effort, whether it’s through the Office of Government Ethics or through Congress,” Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said.
Blumenthal also chastised the president for “putting himself above the law.”
The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which will likely be chaired by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., in the new Congress, is planning to continue a bipartisan investigation launched last year into the use of private email accounts for official business by White House officials, including Ivanka Trump.
Cummings said in a statement the White House never provided the committee with documents that had been requested.
“We need those documents to ensure that Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, and other officials are complying with federal records laws and there is a complete record of the activities of this Administration,” Cummings said. “My goal is to prevent this from happening again — not to turn this into a spectacle the way Republicans went after Hillary Clinton.”
According to the Washington Post, Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails to Trump administration officials using a personal account with a domain she shared with Jared Kushner, her husband and a White House senior adviser. The private account was used fewer than 100 times to discuss government policies and official business. Hundreds of emails, however, were related to Ivanka Trump’s official work schedule and travel details.
Some of the emails ran afoul of the Presidential Records Act, which mandates the preservation of all presidential records.
Ivanka Trump’s account was discovered as part of a public records lawsuit filed by American Oversight last year.
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Abbe Lowell, ethics counsel for Ivanka Trump, admitted she “sometimes used her private account” while transitioning into her government position, “almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family.”
“When concerns were raised in the press 14 months ago, Ms. Trump reviewed and verified her email use with White House counsel and explained the issue to congressional leaders,” he said in a statement.
The White House did not return a request for comment.
Ivanka Trump’s private email account has led some to draw comparisons to Hillary Clinton’s use of a personal email address while serving as secretary of state.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, then-candidate Donald Trump frequently derided Clinton for her actions, calling her “Crooked Hillary” and prompting crowds of his supporters to chant, “Lock her up.”
Mirijanian, however, dismissed any parallels between the two.
“To address misinformation being peddled about Ms. Trump’s personal email, she did not create a private server in her house or office, there was never classified information transmitted, the account was never transferred or housed at Trump Organization, no emails were ever deleted, and the emails have been retained in the official account in conformity with records preservation laws and rules,” he said.
But in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee and House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, American Oversight said the similarities between Ivanka Trump’s conduct and Clinton’s “are inescapable.”
“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,” Austin Evers, the group’s executive director, said in his letter.
“While much of the rhetoric surrounding Secretary Clinton’s use of personal email was hyperbolic and untethered to the law or facts, the extensive use of personal email by a senior public official raises important questions that merit investigation,” he continued.
Evers urged the two panels to investigate Ivanka Trump’s actions.
“The American public insists that all public officials, including the president’s daughter, comply with federal law,” Evers said.
House Democrats also seized on the president’s focus on Clinton’s use of a private email server and the revelation involving his daughter.
“Cue the chant?” Rep. Joyce Beatty, D-Ohio, tweeted Tuesday.
“Karma has a sense of humor. #IvankaGate,” Rep. Lacy Clay, D-Mo., said on Twitter.
In an interview with CNN, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., said an “ongoing problem” with the Trump administration could be their compliance with the rules.
“She is a senior adviser to the president. She should be only operating on government emails,” he said of Ivanka Trump. “The fact that the president made such an issue during the campaign and that his daughter didn’t know about it and didn’t understand it just shows how helter skelter this White House is. They obviously are not teaching their employees or instructing their employees on the rules, they’re not supervising, and they’re not monitoring.”
