Cummings warned that he didn’t want any investigation to get out of hand as he said happened with Clinton.
A new report that Ivanka Trump used a personal email account to conduct official White House business is likely to breathe new life into a bipartisan probe launched by the House Oversight Committee last year, the committee’s incoming chairman hinted Tuesday.
The top Democrat on the committee, Elijah Cummings, said Tuesday that while the committee had requested information from the Trump administration on officials’ use of private email over a year ago, the White House has still not responded to those requests, citing an internal review.
“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 said in a statement. “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.”
The Washington Post reported Monday that before Ivanka Trump joined the White House as a senior adviser to her father, she communicated with current administration officials through her personal email account and continued to do so occasionally once she joined the administration, sending “hundreds” of emails from her personal account.
A spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s attorney sought to downplay the report, claiming to the Post that she was unaware of guidance regarding personal email use and records preservation while in the White House, and that she has since turned over emails regarding White House business to be preserved like other official records.
The House Oversight Committee last fall called for the White House to disclose the names of any top officials who use a private email address or encrypted technology for government work after POLITICO reported that Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, also an adviser to the president, set up a family email domain for the two of them.
Ivanka Trump’s defense that she was unaware of policies regarding the use of a personal email account has raised eyebrows because of her father’s constant hammering during the 2016 presidential campaign of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for a similar offense. The spokesperson for Ivanka Trump’s attorney told the Post that unlike Clinton, Ivanka Trump did not send classified information over her personal email account, nor did she delete batches of emails, as Clinton did.
The watchdog group whose Freedom of Information Act requests prompted the discovery of Trump’s emails on Tuesday called for a congressional investigation.
“The president’s family is not above the law, and there are serious questions that Congress should immediately investigate,” said Austin Evers, executive director of American Oversight. “Did Ivanka Trump turn over all of her emails for preservation as required by law? Was she sending classified information over a private system?”
“For more than two years, President Trump and senior leaders in Congress have made it very clear that they view the use of personal email servers for government business to be a serious offense that demands investigation and even prosecution, and we expect the same standard will be applied in this case,” the group added in a statement.
But even as Ivanka Trump’s use of a personal email account has drawn accusations of hypocrisy from Democrats, Cummings warned that he didn’t want any investigation to get out of hand, as he said happened with Clinton.
“My goal is to prevent this from happening again — not to turn this into a spectacle the way Republicans went after Hillary Clinton,” he said, pledging that “my main priority as Chairman will be to focus on the issues that impact Americans in their everyday lives.”
