Ivanka Trump Used Personal Account For Emails About Government Business (washingtonpost.com)

The Washington Post is reporting that Ivanka Trump used a personal email account to send hundreds of emails last year to White House aids, Cabinet officials and her assistants. Many of the emails were "in violation of federal records rules," the report says. Ivanka's practices are reminiscent of the personal email account Hillary Clinton used as secretary of state. From the report: White House ethics officials learned of Trump's repeated use of personal email when reviewing emails gathered last fall by five Cabinet agencies to respond to a public records lawsuit. That review revealed that throughout much of 2017, she often discussed or relayed official White House business using a private email account with a domain that she shares with her husband, Jared Kushner. Some aides were startled by the volume of Ivanka Trump's personal emails -- and taken aback by her response when questioned about the practice. Trump said she was not familiar with some details of the rules, according to people with knowledge of her reaction. A spokesperson for Ivanka Trump's attorney and ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, "acknowledged that the president's daughter occasionally used her private email before she was briefed on the rules, but he said none of her messages contained classified information," reports Washington Post.

"While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family," he said in a statement. He went on to say that her email use was different than that of Clinton. "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," Mirijanian said.

Comments

Re: let the apologists start jumping through hoops

[Jhon]

" I think that the origins of what we currently think of as representative democratic government originates in the UK in the Middle Ages"

"With modern communications technologies it is entirely practical for our government to allow us, as citizens, to participate at a much greater level than we do today"

There is a reason our (United States) government was *NOT* set up like the UK. Our founders found the build of parliamentary forms of government wildly unstable -- and a new "government" could and demonstrably DID enact law based on the passions of the moment. Such laws ended up contributing to the Revolution and much of the tyranny we excoriated. Read the bill of rights -- much it was because of war crimes committed by the Crown against the colonies.

The Senate was *NOT* supposed to be elected by the people -- they were supposed to be appointed by respective states to represent the states interests. The 17th amendment changed that -- and while I understand the reason why, it had unintended consequences on our republic. And we *ARE* more a republic than a democracy -- or at least were were originally designed to be so. Senators were to be allowed to serve without the need to round support (campaign) and no be influenced by the passions of the population to any great degree.

The House of representatives was to directly represent the people and were democratically elected. While the Senate was designed to have more POWER than the house -- the house was granted the purse strings on funding to balance that. With some effort, the House can reign in the Senate.

The President was never meant to be directly elected by the people, but by the states. Each state has a democratic election for the President. Well, not REALLY, they are voting for whom their state will support -- and that support is weighted to match the number of representatives they have in Congress (a fairly close match to population, but not perfect). That's why it doesn't MATTER if you get 1 more vote or 2 million more votes for president in a given state -- you get the ENTIRE states weight in electors. Again, this was by design. The fear was that we would have an executive who would represent the interests of the larger/richer states at the time (Virginia, in 1787, was a prime example) and ignore the smaller, less populous states. This would force some type of compromise in getting an executive in office and force them to not ignore parts of the nation.

There's a great story (probably apocryphal -- but pretty demonstrative of the thought at the time) where Jefferson, when returning from France after the Constitution was adopted sat with Washington having tea. Jefferson asked "Why two houses, why a Senate? Why not just one, representing all the people?" And Washington asked "Why do you pour your tea in your saucer?" Jefferson responded: "To let it cool so I do not get burned". Washington answered: "And that's why we have the Senate -- to let new law cool and be tempered by time and thought".

The fact is, our country was founded based on trying to "FIX" those shortfalls in the various governments of the world at the time. They were more afraid of democracy than of monarchy. It was their genius when they put power in the hands of the people to FIX problems that may occur if any one part of our government became too powerful -- by voting in people to cut the purse strings and starve it off the vine of our nation.

Re:Lock her up?

[vtcodger]

"Lock her Up" For what?

Lost in all this is the fact that Ms Trump's use of personal eMail is entirely legal. As was Ms Clinton's mostly. There is, and was in Ms Clinton's day, a requirement that the emails be archived and accessible to the public. Nowadays, there is a requirement that the archiving be done within a time limit (20 days?). In Ms Clinton's day there was no such time limit. GWB's first term Secretary of State Colin Powell still hasn't gotten around to archiving HIS 2001-2005 emails.

And yes, commingling of official and personal eMails is OK. Only the official stuff has to be archived.

The issue of classified material on Ms Clinton's server is a separate issue -- complicated by the fact that as Secretary of State, Ms Clinton has considerable power to reclassify stuff. For all I or anyone else around here knows, a formal hearing would determine that Ms Clinton actually declassified the material in question, but didn't properly mark it. That's a parking ticket level misdemeanor offense at best. Not something people are locked up for even in America.

The outrageous conduct of Donald Trump and his crazed supporters seriously clouds the issue of course. And Democrats can smile and laugh for a few days about this. But really, there's apparently no fire and damn little smoke here.