Ivanka Trump, elder daughter and senior adviser of President Donald Trump, broke her silence Wednesday on the controversy surrounding her use of private email to conduct state business during her early days in the White House.
In an interview with ABC News’ Deborah Roberts in Idaho, Ivanka Trump said she saw “no equivalency” between her use of private email and Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email account and server to conduct official business during four years as secretary of state.
“People who want to see it as the same see it as the same,” Trump told Roberts while on a trip promoting STEM initiatives (for science, technology, engineering, and math) with Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Trump argued that no comparison can be made with Clinton’s routine use of unsecure private email as President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state, something her father and his supporters frequently targeted on the 2016 campaign trail, often chanting, “Lock her up!”
“All of my emails are stored and preserved,” Trump said. “There were no deletions, there is no attempt to hide. There’s no equivalency to what my father has spoken about.”
“So the idea of ‘Lock her up!’ doesn’t apply to you?” Roberts asked.
“No,” Trump replied.
Trump explained that while Clinton’s use of a private email account included sending classified information over a private server, her own use of private email followed White House protocol and contained nothing confidential.
“There is no restriction of using personal email,” Trump noted. “In fact, we’re instructed that if we receive an email to our personal account that could relate to government work, you simply just forward it to your government account so it can be archived.”
The president defended his daughter’s use of private email in early 2017 the day after The Washington Post broke the story earlier this month.
“She wasn’t doing anything to hide her emails,” the president told reporters on the South Lawn of the White House. “They were not classified, unlike Hillary Clinton, which were classified. It is all fake news.”
Democrats, however, said Nov. 20 that they plan to investigate Ivanka Trump’s private email use in the White House, The New York Times reported.
Several prominent Republicans, including Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., and Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., have endorsed looking into her practice, according to Newsweek.
