First daughter Ivanka Trump defended her practice of conducting White House business on a private email server and struck back forcefully against many of the comparisons now being made between her and Hillary Clinton.
“All of my emails are stored and preserved. There were no deletions. There is no attempt to hide,” said Trump during an interview with ABC News’ Deborah Roberts. “There’s no equivalency to what my father’s spoken about.”
Trump’s oblique reference to “what my father’s spoken about” refers to President Trump’s criticism of Clinton during the 2016 campaign for her use of a private email to conduct official government business while she served as secretary of state.
A month before the election, Donald Trump called the Clinton email scandal “bigger than Watergate,” describing it as “corruption … on a scale we have never seen before.”
The difference Ivanka Trump alluded to was the 33,000 emails that Secretary Clinton deleted from her private email server. Trump insisted that there had been no such deletions on her end.
“There is no restriction of using personal email,” Ivanka Trump told Roberts. “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.”
That breezy assessment, however, is not shared by Democrats, who have vowed to push ahead with a congressional investigation with their newly empowered House majority next year.
Last week, The Hill reported that the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee would look into whether Ivanka’s emails complied with the presidential record act and federal records act.