Ivanka Trump Defends Use of Private Email, Says It's Nothing Like Hillary Clinton's
Critics took Ivanka Trump to task after The Washington Post reported that she had used a personal email account to conduct official government business — a practice that struck many as ironic, considering her father's forceful calls to "lock up" Hillary Clinton for her using a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State. But on Tuesday night, Ivanka appeared on ABC News and defended herself, asserting that there's "no equivalency" between her private emails and Clinton's server scandal.
Ivanka sat down with ABC News' Deborah Roberts and publicly addressed the emails for the first time. Roberts reminded the First Daughter of her father's constant attacks on Clinton and asked her how she ended up in a similar situation.
"Well, there really is no equivalency," Ivanka said. "All of my emails that relate to any form of government work, which was mainly scheduling and logistics and managing the fact that I have a home life and a work life, are all part of the public record. They're all stored on the White House system. So, everything has ben preserved, everything has been archived. There just is no equivalency between the two things."
When Roberts noted that many people see the situations as the same, Ivanka replied that "people who want to see it as the same see it as the same. But the fact is that we all have private emails and personal emails to coordinate with our family. We all receive content to those email, and there is no prohibition from using private email as long as it's archived and as long as there's nothing in it that's classified."
“So the idea of ‘Lock her up!’ doesn’t apply to you?” Roberts asked later in the interview.
“No,” Ivanka replied.
President Trump had come to his daughter's defense in earlier in the month. At a press conference a few weeks ago, he told reporters that Ivanka's emails "weren’t classified like Hillary Clinton."
"They weren’t deleted like Hillary Clinton… She wasn’t doing anything to hide her emails. I looked at it just very briefly today, [and] they’re all in presidential records,” he said.
It's not the first time Ivanka has found herself embroiled in controversy since taking on a role as a White House aide in her father's administration. She's often been the source of scrutiny, particularly for refusing to speak up on important political issues. In the past, social media users have called her out repeatedly for waiting to make a statement about the Trump administration's immigration and family separation policies, and she was also lambasted for staying silent about the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, despite positioning herself as a champion for women's rights.
