Ivanka Trump Sent Out Hundreds of Emails from Personal Account to Discuss Government Business

A Washington Post report on Monday revealed that Ivanka Trump had been sending out hundreds of emails from her personal account to discuss official government business.

The discovery instantly reminded the American people of Donald Trump’s repeated attacks on Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential race. Clinton came under fire for using her private email account and server to deal with official governmental affairs. Back then, Trump mobilized his supporters against the former secretary of state by claiming that someone who put the national security at risk could not be trusted with the presidential position. Trump also attempted to criminalize Clinton, pushing for an FBI investigation into whether the latter had violated laws by using a private account to exchange classified information.

“How can Hillary run the economy when she can’t even send emails without putting entire nation at risk,” read Trump’s tweet back in 2016 in June 2016. “The invention of email has proven to be a very bad thing for Crooked Hillary in that it has proven her to be both incompetent and a liar!”

Clinton herself attributed her defeat in the presidential campaign to the email controversy. “There are lots of reasons why an election like this is not successful,” she told her donors. “Our analysis is that Comey’s letter raising doubts that were groundless, baseless, proven to be, stopped our momentum.”

This was why after Washington Post exposed Ivanka Trump’s case, many were appalled by the hypocrisy of the current administration.

A liberal organization named American Oversight sent a letter to the House Oversight Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday urging Congress to open up an investigation immediately.

“The parallels between Ms. Trump’s conduct and that of Secretary Clinton are inescapable,” said the group’s executive director Austin Evers. “In both her use of personal email and post-discovery preservation efforts, Ms. Trump appears to have done exactly what Secretary Clinton did — conduct over which President Trump and many members of Congress regularly lambasted Secretary Clinton and which, they asserted, demonstrated her unfitness for office.”

Democrats did not miss the chance to ridicule the ironic situation unfolding in the White House. Rep. William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) commented, “Karma has a sense of humor,” on a Twitter story about Ms. Trump’s misuse of personal email accounts. Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) tweeted “Cue the chant?”, referring to how Trump supporters used to criminalize Hillary Clinton and chant “Lock her up!” during campaign rallies.

The House Oversight Committee indeed intends to look into the case. It will examine the emails Ms. Trump sent out in order to decide whether she had broken any federal laws. Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), the incoming chairperson of the penal, revealed that the penal tried to investigate into White House staff members’ use of email accounts last year but did not receive any cooperation from the White House.

“We need those documents to ensure that Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and other officials are complying with federal records laws and there is a complete record of the activities of this Administration,” he said.

President Trump, as usual, called the Washington Post report “fake news” as a response. According to him, his daughter’s case was nothing like what happened to Clinton. For one, “she wasn’t doing anything to hide her emails.” He also argued that Ms. Trump’s emails did not have any classified information and was not sent from an extensive home server.

“What it is is a false story,” he told reporters at the White House.