During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump delighted in leading his supporters to chant choruses of “lock her up,” his slogan marking his belief that Hillary Clinton should have been jailed over her use of a private email address to conduct government business while serving as secretary of state.
One wonders if President Trump feels like a hypocrite after today’s revelation, scooped by Newsweek, that presidential daughter Ivanka Trump used her personal email account to correspond with government officials after her father took office.
This report comes on the heels of last week’s scoop that Ivanka Trump’s husband and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, also used private email for government business.
Today’s Newsweek report noted that Ivanka Trump emailed several government addresses in February 2017, after her father had taken office but before she became an “unpaid federal employee” in March 2017. Via Newsweek:
On February 28, [Ivanka] Trump—identifying herself as Ivanka Kushner—emailed Linda McMahon, the administrator of the United States Small Business Administration, from a personal domain. At the time, Trump was operating inside the White House in a non-official capacity. She wrote that she wanted McMahon’s agency and her staff to “explore opportunities to collaborate” on issues related to “women’s entrepreneurship.” She copied on the correspondence the government email addresses for two other federal employees, Dina Powell and Julie Radford.
Ivanka Trump may be in a legal gray zone regarding when, and under what circumstances, her work constituted "official" government business. After all, she was attending official White House meetings, including one with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, back in February — before she was officially an (unpaid) employee of the White House.
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