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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.
"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.
Using personal email for work and vice-versa is something everybody does, even though it's often against some policy.
What matters is whether Classified information is being sent over unsecured links.
"Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, ..."
How is using the Trump Organization's server any better than using one in her own home or office? In fact, it is likely worse, because there will be more people with administrative access, simply because it is a bigger organization.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Ivanka’s personal email is being hosted on a server running in Hillary Clinton’s basement.
#DeleteChrome
Ivanka is Trump's daughter who has an official government position. She should be subject to the same rules as other employees. The first lady is Melania Trump. That is another person entirely.
of the emails. What I care about is that my public officials are using private email servers to get around public records requests.
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False equivalence. The president's daughter sending emails with a personal account when she doesn't have any official position is not the same.
Senior Adviser to the President is an official position.
She is a CIVILIAN. And her participation in the presidency is "Voluntary"
The Secretary of State is a civilian. And also a voluntary position.
Ivanka Trump is a Senior Adviser to the President, which is an official government position. Complete with all of us sending her a paycheck.
Ivanka is Trump's daughter who has an official government position. She should be subject to the same rules as other employees. The first lady is Melania Trump. That is another person entirely.
Once upon a time Hyprocrisy mattered, didn't it? I mean even when a republican does it?
Off the top of my head:
Trump and his iphone.
Trump with Russians in the Oval Office.
Omarosa recording a conversation in what was almost undoubtably a closed and secure area.
Ivaka using private email.
Hell Comey had some private email.
Trump not keeping up on his briefings, which is arguably worse than the Iphone thing. If there is one thing worse than an intelligence leak, is intelligence that should have lead to action that didn't.
Trump lying about everything, after nicknaming people "Lying Ted" and similar. Hell he even said, with a straight face "I will never lie to you." Think about this. Obama said, "If you like your plan you can keep it," instead of "If you like your plan and it meets the new minimum coverage standards you can keep it," and they all but nailed him to a cross for years. Trump says, "I'm going to give you the best healthcare," and then he tries to destroy it, partly succeeds, and does nothing to replace it at all.
Trump saying he is great for the press, health care, African Americans, Mexicans, etc, and doing things that show the opposite.
Once upon a time hyprocrisy and lies mattered, but it doesn't seem to now. Very few have changed teams as a result. The Tribes are set. Sure a little movement happens, but mostly you just motivate both bases, with increasing hate and increasing devotion and/or fear. Hell Trump just talked smack about the guy in charge of getting Osama Bin Laden. The fox news article is, "RNC backs Trump attack on retired Navy Admiral William McRaven" In short, the republican national convention didn't repudiate him, they backed him up.
Trump's words there were, "He was a hillary/obama backer" That's it. For Trump backing the opposing party, even if its not true, is the same as what? Being evil? Being wrong? I don't get it.
It's clear that Trump has no decency, but shouldn't some other republicans stand up? It seems they are quite happy to walk down the nature trail to hell (road to authoritarian rule).
After advising her father in an unofficial capacity for the first two months of his administration, she was appointed Advisor to the President, a government employee, on March 29, 2017. She takes no salary.[3] Prior to becoming a federal employee, she used a personal email for government work.
In other words, her e-mails were not an issue because she was not yet a Federal employee. But let's go ahead and consider that equivalent to the Secretary of State running a private server in her bathroom, and passing thousands of classified and Top Secret e-mails through it. By all means, show your hypocrisy!
Where is your outrage over that?
Stop lying. You are pretending to be "Fair and Balanced", but what you are truly doing is spewing right wing disinformation.
If being a hypocrite was a toxin you would be dead and the region around your body would be treated like a radioactive disaster zone.
Why is Snark Required?
Which happened after her emails from a private server, at least according to Newsweek.
Still a complete horseshit equivalency - even if she's been using private email since joining the White House staff. She's not an Original Classification Authority, the way Hillary was, trading in the highest levels of classified information as a part of her job. Nor has Ivanka set up her own private email server in Jared's house, nor has she used it exclusively.
If we're going to contemplate a rethink of the mechanics of government, can I suggest that we start at "first principles"?
I may have this completely wrong (and happy to be corrected, but this is secondary to my point)... but I think that the origins of what we currently think of as representative democratic government originates in the UK in the Middle Ages. In return for money for wars, the King was forced to give up some power and through that deal, the UK gradually transitioned to representative government. The House of Commons in the UK was founded in 1341 - the fourteenth century!
Here's the key part... The technology of the day was "horse and rider". It took between 4 days and one week to travel from London to York. The fastest means of communication was a courier on a fast horse... This meant that the only way the areas in the north of the country could participate in the decisions of government was to pick a volunteer who would travel to London (the seat of power) and represent the town or village. What has happened, then is that we have adopted a model of government that was effectively forced by the limitations of transport of the age.
In other words, we have based today's model of government upon a set of conditions that are very nearly 700 years old and are completely out-dated.
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. Indeed, any major decision could easily be supported by an all-digital referendum. For example, we might decide that we would only go to war with another country if a democratic majority of citizens agreed that it was necessary to do so.
When I make this observation in discussions with friends, I sometimes get challenges along the lines of, "It would be too easy to rig those sorts of votes..." but to which my response is always to point out that every single day we process billions of dollars worth of transactions electronically. Many people conduct their banking by mobile phone. Many more use the internet. So there are ways and means by which we could make this secure.
You might wonder why is it that we don't have this form of more democratic voting already? Why do we continue to rely upon representative government if a better alternative is available? The answer is simple: corruption is much easier to achieve when you only have a small number of people you need to bribe/blackmail/coerce. No? Just look at the amount of money in politics. Just look at the amount spent in campaign contributions? Just look at the number of lobbyists running around in the halls of power. A move toward distributed democratization would truly give power back to the people. It would also reduce the vast and expensive machine of government to an administrative office that served the will of the people.
That has to be a good thing.
The reason we don't have more direct democracy is that to work properly it requires the population to be well informed, and for the most part populations aren't. People prefer to delegate to elected representatives so that they don't have to become an expert on everything government gets involved in and so that theoretically informed decisions are made.
Another issue is that direct democracy is rather powerful, and democracy relies on individuals and individual institutions not having too much power. Checks and balances.
Democracy is a process too, so the nature of individual votes on often binary questions isn't really suited to it.
As an example of what can go wrong, look at Brexit. The population was not informed, in fact most of the information that was available was false or misleading. The question was both binary and unclear: leave or remain, but neither position was defined. And after a slim majority voted in favour of leaving that single event has been used to wield an enormous amount of power, so much so that new balances had to be introduced and it's not clear yet if they are strong enough.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
" 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.
"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.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I agree mostly. Legally this is a nothingburger, and even less of a nothing burger than Hillary's email were.
Where i disagree with you is with the significance of the optics.
Trump and the republican party at large wandered around for months making a mountain out of Hillary's email -- Fox news still seems to make it a landing page headline every few days.
Given that environment, anyone with an ounce of common sense associated with Trump or the republican party would have made damned sure not to be using a personal email for government work of any sort.
If you make it a central plank of your campaign that Hillary Clinton's misuse of email not only disqualifies her for public service, but demands a prosecution, demands incarceration. Then you don't get caught using a personal email server yourself, no matter how trivial it REALLY is.
Legally there's no fire here, but the apparent level of hypocrisy, arrogance, and stupidity on display is staggering. Or it would be if it wasn't just another day in this dumpster fire of an administration.