Ivanka Trump and other advisers 'used private email for White House business'
The President's daughter and other close advisers are reported to have used private email to discuss White House matters.
Tuesday 26 September 2017 17:49, UK
Ivanka Trump used a private email address to discuss White House business while working as an adviser to her father, reports say.
Ms Trump is one of at least six of President Donald Trump's staff who are named in the US media as having used a personal account at various times during the administration's first eight months.
She is reported to have used a private account while she worked as an unpaid adviser in the first months of after Mr Trump took office in January.
Officials have admitted she also did so occasionally after becoming an official White House adviser.
The New York Times reports former chief strategist Steve Bannon and ex-chief of staff Reince Priebus also sometimes used a private email addresses to discuss White House matters.
They both no longer work at the White House.
Other Trump advisers, including chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and strategist Stephen Miller, reportedly sent or received "at least a few" emails on personal accounts.
Ms Trump's husband Jared Kushner - a senior Trump adviser - has revealed via his lawyer, that he used a private account to send or receive around 100 work-related emails between January and August, on various topics including media coverage and planning events.
The disclosures have led to charges of hypocrisy from Democrats, following Mr Trump's repeated criticism of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election campaign over her use of a private email account for official business while secretary of state under Barack Obama.
Dubbing her "Crooked Hillary", Mr Trump led chants of "lock her up" at campaign rallies, saying "she has to go to jail".
In her recently released book What Happened, Ms Clinton cites former FBI director James Comey's investigation into her emails, conducted in the closing weeks of the election, as one of the .
However, while there are similarities, the scale of use differs dramatically.
Mrs Clinton stored classified information on a private server and used an exclusively private account for government work entailing tens of thousands of emails.
While it is unknown how many emails were sent or received by Mr Trump's advisers or how frequently they used private accounts, Trump administration officials say their use was sporadic. The emails have not been made public.
While it is not illegal for US government officials to use private email accounts, they are expected to forward any emails to a work email account so that are available to the public and for those conducting oversight.