The email controversy of Ivanka Trump, explained



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The concern aroused by the private use of email in the performance of public duties is still topical. Just swap Hillary Clinton for Ivanka Trump.

President Donald Trump's daughter and presidential adviser has been at the center of controversy over her digital communication habits.

The firestorm began in mid-November, when Carol Leonnig and the Washington Post's Josh Dawsey reported that Ivanka Trump had sent hundreds of emails to assistants, cabinet officials and her assistant via a Private email account that she shared with her husband, Jared Kushner. Last year, it was reported that Kushner had also used a private account to manage government affairs.

The revelations about Trump's use of email immediately established comparisons with Clinton, who during his 2016 presidential campaign had been challenged by questions about his use of a private email server as secretary of Trump. 'State. Supporters of Donald Trump campaigning and to this day often sing "Lock it up!" In reference to Clinton's e-mails.

Ivanka Trump says her case has nothing to do with Clinton and that concerns about her use of email are unjustified. In an interview with Deborah Roberts of ABC News, broadcast on Hello America Wednesday, Trump said there was "no equivalence" between his actions and those of Clinton.

It may be true that Trump's use of e-mail was not a bad plot to circumvent the government's record-keeping, but rather an oversight as it adapted to the reality of government. The discussions on this subject may be exaggerated – but the same goes for Clinton.

Given the attention given to Clinton's emails, it's hard to imagine that Trump might not have thought his actions were a bad idea. The use of Trump's e-mail – and her excuse – is a good illustration of the role she tries to play in public life: she is a wise political adviser when it is appropriate, and a political novice and an obedient girl in the public service. opposite case.

Ivanka's emails, briefly explained

According to the Post, President Trump's staff were alarmed by the volume and nature of Ivanka Trump's use of e-mail when she joined the White House in 2017, fearing that her practices would resemble Clinton's.

When asked about this, Trump told her assistants that she did not know the rules of federal registers banning such practices. This is what his representatives also told La Poste.

Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Trump's attorney and ethics counselor, Abbe Lowell, told the publication that during his transition to the government – but after receiving a White House courier account – Trump "sometimes used his personal account, almost always for logistical and planning reasons. his family. That took place, he said, "until the White House gives him the same advice as everyone else. "

Mirijanian said that Trump had already sent all his government-related emails so that they could be stored with the White House archives.

Trump told ABC of Roberts something similar in the interview aired on Wednesday.

"All my e-mails concerning any form of government work, which mainly concerned planning and logistics and handled the fact that I had a personal and professional life, are all part of the public register," she said. she declared. "They are all stored on the White House system."

When Roberts pushed back, Trump did the same. "The fact is that we all have private and personal emails to coordinate with our family. We all receive the content of these emails and nothing forbids the use of private emails as long as they are archived and as long as there is nothing classified. ," she says.

Trump was also a victim of indirect blows to Clinton, claiming that she had no intention of bypassing the White House's messaging system and that she had not indulged in "massive deletions" after the publication of a subpoena.

As PolitiFact explains, an employee of a company that runs Clinton's mail server deleted 33,000 of her emails in 2015, a few weeks after the Benghazi committee issued a subpoena asking her to receive e-mails related to the 2012 Libya attack, after realizing that it had been asked so in 2014 and did not. The FBI has found no evidence that emails have been deliberately deleted to bypass the subpoena.

Democrats in the House have announced plans to investigate the use of Trump's e-mail when they win a majority in Congress next year. As the New York Times notes last year, members of Congress launched a bipartisan investigation into the use of private email by many White House officials, including Kushner. But they did not go very far.

Ivanka's emails are important – and they do not

Many observers have criticized the use of Ivanka Trump's e-mail and pointed to the hypocrisy of the situation: President Trump and his allies today claim that Clinton committed a criminal activity using a private server (despite the conclusion of the FBI that she did not do it), but when it comes to Ivanka Trump, they say it does not matter.

President Trump said last week that his daughter "had sent emails" in a time that he had described as "early and for a short time".

"Everything is in the presidential archives. Everything is here. There was no suppression. There was nothing, "continued Trump. "What it is is a false story."

The use of Clinton's e-mail was a focal point in the 2016 elections, even after the FBI declared that no charges would be laid against her, although the bureau also ruled her actions extremely careless ". The case has often dominated the news cycle and still remains topical. often featured on Fox News and relied on by the president.

A study done earlier this year on the New York Times' election coverage revealed that in the space of just six days during the last stage of the 2016 campaign, the Times has released as many news releases. Cover articles on Clinton's emails that they had sent about all the policy issues put together. 69 days before the elections.

Ivanka Trump apparently did not learn the lesson from Clinton's use of email and did not apply it to her own actions. The Trump administration was not the only one in the Trump administration to go bankrupt. Last year, the Times announced that many other people, including Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Gary Cohn and Stephen Miller, also occasionally used private email addresses.

If Clinton's e-mails were so important, why would not Ivanka be so? Or, conversely, if we now recognize that Ivanka's emails are not such a big contract, does that not shed light on the possibility that Clinton probably was not so?

The late-night hosts quickly pointed to hypocrisy when the story of emails broke out.

"It's really damaging – if anything mattered more," the Last showof the Stephen Colbert joked.

"Hillary, meanwhile, is having a good time today," said Jimmy Kimmel, of Live! I said.

Colbert's team also prepared a segmented comparison of Clinton's breathtaking Clinton messaging coverage with her silence on Ivanka Trump.

Ivanka Trump wants to have her cake and eat it too

Ivanka Trump has sought to pretend to be a reluctant member of the Trump administration, as a figure driven by her father's surprise political ancestry and who is just there to lend a hand.

She took office at the White House in March 2017 and closed during the summer her eponymous fashion brand, thus indicating that she was heading more towards politics. Still, she tries to play the other side when it suits her.

In June 2017, a few months after joining the White House in an official capacity, Trump said in an interview with Fox and friends that she is really trying to "stay out of politics" and that she is not a "political scientist".

In September of the same year, Trump told the Financial Times that people had "unrealistic expectations" of him as a moderating force for his father. "That my presence in itself weighs so heavily with my father that he would abandon his core values ​​and the program for which the American people voted in his election," she said.

In an interview with Peter Alexander of NBC News in February, she reprimanded the interviewer for asking questions about the multiple women who accused her father of sexual harassment and assault. She said it was a "rather inappropriate question to ask a girl".

Trump was positioned as a strong supporter of families and women, but during the family separation crisis, she was publicly silent, only voicing when the president announced that there was would end.

But at other times, Trump acts as if she knows exactly what she's doing.

She sat for her father at the G20 summit last year and this year she could replace Nikki Haley as the United States ambassador to the United Nations (Trump dismantled those rumors). In the same interview where Trump had accused Alexander of asking her about the charges against her father, she had discussed US-North Korean relations.

In November, Trump participated in a campaign rally with his father in Cleveland. When he mentioned Clinton, the crowd chanted, predictably, "Lock it up".

In the interview with ABC, Roberts asked Ivanka Trump if the mantra "lock her" applied to her, given the use of her email.

"No," Trump replied with a laugh.

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