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US House Democrats to investigate Ivanka‘s use of private emails

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump make their way to board Marine One before departing from South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC on October 30, 2018. (Photo by AFP)

Democratic lawmakers in the US House of Representatives have announced that they will launch an official investigation into Ivanka Trump's use of a personal email account to determine whether her act was in breach of federal law.

The move was prompted on Tuesday, a day after the Washington Post revealed that US President Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, who is also a senior White House adviser, had violated federal records rules by sending emails to government officials throughout much of 2017 via her personal email account.

The Post claimed that ethics officials had uncovered hundreds of emails sent by a domain Ivanka shares with her husband, Jared Kushner.

US Representative Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, announced that the panel had started a bipartisan investigation last year into White House staffers' use of personal email and whether they were in compliance with records law.

“We plan to continue our investigation of the presidential records act and federal records act, and we want to know if Ivanka complied with the law,” Cummings said in a statement.

"We launched a bipartisan investigation last year into White House officials' use of private email accounts for official business, but the White House never gave us the information we requested," Cummings noted.

"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," he added.

The Maryland representative said his goal to renew efforts to look into private emails was to "prevent this from happening again – not to turn this into a spectacle the way Republicans went after Hillary Clinton."

Ivanka’s lawyer denied that his client had used her email for classified information but said she had used it for “logistics and scheduling concerning her family.”

"Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no emails were ever deleted," Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Ivanka’s attorney, told the Post.

Mirijanian also said that Ivanka’s emails have been forwarded to her official government account in order to comply with the federal records law.

Ivanka’s email case ‘fake news’                                         

Trump on Tuesday rejected as "fake news" reports that his daughter may have breached federal law by using a personal email account to conduct government business.

The US president also dismissed parallels to his 2016 Democratic presidential rival Hillary Clinton's private email setup, saying Ivanka’s emails did not contain classified information and that she did not use an extensive home server.

"She wasn’t doing anything to hide her emails," Trump said of his daughter while speaking to reporters at the White House. "There was no deleting like Hillary Clinton did. There was no server in the basement like Hillary Clinton had. You were talking about a whole different, you're talking about fake news."

The email scandal haunted the former first lady for a long time and prompted a long-running FBI investigation that, although exonerated her from all criminal charges, ended up costing her the presidential face-off with Donald Trump.

The then-Republican candidate used the email issue to hammer Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign and Trump supporters still chant "lock her up!" at campaign rallies.


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