While news of Ivanka Trump's use of a personal email account to discuss official government business in 2017 was not entirely surprising to ethics watchdogs, critics on Tuesday called the development new evidence of the "shameless hypocrisy" demonstrated by the Trump administration, with some calling for an investigation into the matter.
After entering the White House as President Donald Trump's senior adviser, Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to government employees and aides detailing government business, including her official travel and work schedules as well as government policies and proposals--months after her father had won the presidency after spending more than a year making Hillary Clinton's personal email use a central theme of his 2016 campaign.
Though her father had just spent his campaign leading crowds all over the U.S. in chants of "Lock her up!" and calling Clinton "Crooked Hillary" due to her use of a private email sever, Ivanka claimed this week that she had not been aware of the rules requiring all White House communications to be sent through the White House email system.
On CNN's "New Day," Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) related the revelation to earlier ethics concerns about Ivanka's continued financial gains from her family's business and her clothing line as well as denouncing the "hypocrisy" displayed by her email use.
"There's no way that she had no knowledge of the rules, but really there's a larger story here which is the mixing of public and private, as with her clothing brand and her public position," said Blumenthal. "The blending and mixing of emails, her private account and public account, and it raises the issue of whether there's anything improper. There should be some kind of investigative effort whether it's through the Office of Government Ethics or Congress."
"I'm disappointed--although not entirely surprised--that this administration disregarded clear laws that they more than anyone should have been aware of," Austin Evers, director of the watchdog group American Oversight, told the Washington Post. "There's the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign. There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn't know better."
Ivanka sent hundreds of emails having to do with her official schedule and potentially dozens of emails regarding government policies, according to the Post, after officially entering the administration at the end of March 2017 and agreeing to follow all White House ethics rules.
Such communications violate the Presidential Records Act, which requires the use of the White House server in order to preserve information and to keep government data secure.
