Since her father took over the Oval Office, Ivanka Trump has played a number of roles: Senior White House aide. Point person on the administration’s promises to champion women and girls. Promoter of GOP candidates in the 2018 midterms.
The going hasn’t been entirely smooth, but being a president’s daughter has its privileges. Among those perks, critics say: not getting in trouble for screwing up.
The latest wave to hit Trump’s ship of state is the news that she used her personal email to do government business. That’s a no-no for a lot of reasons. For one, as the Washington Post noted, it might run afoul of the Presidential Records Act, which says all government communications must be archived—something that’s obviously harder to do if people use private accounts for public work.
If this scenario sounds familiar, no surprise there: America heard plenty about public versus private emails during the 2016 race for president, when Republican Donald Trump insisted that Democrat Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server supposedly proved she was “crooked” and unfit to run the country.
It’s not necessarily fair to consider the Hillary Clinton and Ivanka Trump cases in exactly the same light—unlike Trump, Clinton was a sitting secretary of state, former first lady, and seasoned politician, for starters. What is clear, though, is that while Donald Trump tweeted up a storm about Clinton’s emails, on Tuesday afternoon, he stormed to his daughter’s defense.
“If Ivanka Trump were any other employee, she would have faced accountability many times over.”
“Early on, and for a little bit of time, Ivanka did some emails, but they 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 of his daughter’s communications when speaking to reporters outside the White House.
“You’re talking about all fake news,” he continued before flying off to his Florida estate with wife Melania, son Barron, and daughters Ivanka and Tiffany. “What it is is a false story. Hillary Clinton deleted 33,000 emails. She had a server in the basement. That’s the real story.”
Austin Evers of American Oversight, a left-leaning ethics group that helped bring Ivanka Trump’s private email use to light, calls this week’s controversy “a textbook example of why we have anti-nepotism laws.”
“If Ivanka Trump were any other employee, she would have faced accountability many times over,” Evers tells Glamour. “She is [among a] specially protected class of employees in the White House that is historically immune from shame and accountability. So all of the criticisms of this White House apply especially to the President and his family, who are running the government in a way that suggests they believe themselves to be above the law.”
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Ivanka Trump’s ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell, told Glamour in a statement that Trump used private email before joining the administration and receiving “a government email account for official use. While transitioning into government, until the White House provided her the same guidance they had to others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her private account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family.”
The statement specifies Trump didn’t use a private server, send classified information, or delete messages, and that “when concerns were raised in the press 14 months ago,” she “reviewed and verified her email use with White House Counsel and explained the issue to congressional leaders.”
Still, Evers maintains that “the notion that [Ivanka Trump] did not understand the rules with respect to personal email use for public officials is absurd,” adding that “even if she didn’t read a newspaper or watch TV or pay any attention to the political campaign in 2016, presumably at one point she had dinner with her father. She, more than anyone else, was in the passenger seat watching Donald Trump’s campaign seize on the email issue.”
This isn’t the first time Trump’s activities have been questioned since her father took office.
Last year, for example, Newsweek reported Trump’s financial disclosures neglected to mention her past role as a director of the Donald J. Trump Foundation—a family charity that came under investigation by the New York State attorney general’s office. (Newsweek also reported on Trump’s email use well before this week’s resurfacing of the issue in the Washington Post.)
“To date, accountability for mistakes [or] problems such as using personal email for government work has been mixed. The Trump family, fairly or not, seems to have some broader room for error in public opinion than other political families because of the lack of previous work in politics,” says Meena Bose, director of the Kalikow Center for the Study of the American Presidency at Hofstra University.
“That said, the email issue is especially surprising given the Trump presidential campaign’s heavy criticism of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server as secretary of state,” Bose adds. “Whether the public now will demand more accountability of Trump family members active in White House politics and governance remains to be seen.”
“From the start of this administration, Ivanka’s role has been relatively unclear. I think that this lack of clarity [may] have allowed her some reprieve from scrutiny over these ethical infractions.”
At least one group, the House Oversight Committee, reportedly plans to investigate whether Trump’s email use broke the law. That could be part of a much bigger push to confront the Trump administration as Democrats prepare to take over the House thanks to this month’s midterm election wins.
Ivanka Trump’s unique position in her father’s administration has opened her up to other kinds of criticism. She’s been assailed for not coming out quickly or loudly enough against the separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border, got pressured to speak up during the divisive confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and was questioned for remaining relatively quiet until the tail end of this year’s election.
Any discussion of Trump’s White House activities is complicated by its mysteries, says Kelly Dittmar of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers.
“From the start of this administration, Ivanka’s role has been relatively unclear. So too has been her influence—whether it’s the moderating influence some have claimed or not, or whether she has little influence at all. I think that this lack of clarity [may] have allowed her some reprieve from scrutiny over these ethical infractions,” Dittmar tells Glamour.
“That said, she has not been without scrutiny over her conflicts of interest, appropriate role, and now emails. The continued question in this administration, however, is what rises to the top amidst many allegations of unethical behaviors, policies, and processes.”
Celeste Katz is senior political reporter for Glamour. Send news tips, questions, and comments to celeste_katz@condenast.com.
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