Ask White House for details

GOP committee chairmen ask White House for details on Ivanka Trump's email use

By CAITLIN OPRYSKO

A pair of Republican committee heads have requested information from the White House regarding Ivanka Trump’s use of a personal email account to conduct official business throughout her time in the administration.

In a letter to White House chief of staff John Kelly, House Oversight Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) asked that the administration provide his committee with an accounting of Ivanka’s email use for government business, including details on whether the White House had complied with security and record-keeping requirements as laid out by the Presidential Records Act, and whether Trump, a senior adviser to her father, had sent any sensitive or classified information over her personal email.

Gowdy noted that while his committee opened an investigation in 2017 into White House staffers' use of personal emails and encrypted devices to conduct official business, the White House had yet to update his committee on the findings of an internal review they said they would conduct last year, and requested a briefing on what the review turned up.

Though Gowdy is retiring from Congress at the end of his term, the House Oversight Chairman-in-waiting, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), indicated Tuesday that under his leadership the panel would continue its probe of personal email use in the White House.

The bipartisan leaders of the Senate Homeland Security Committee on Tuesday also wrote to the White House asking for details about Ivanka’s email use and any training she received regarding compliance with record-keeping statutes. Chairman Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and ranking member Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) wrote to White House counsel Emmet Flood to request information that would help the committee determine “the extent to which Mrs. Trump’s use of personal email for official business was intentional and substantial versus inadvertent and de minimis.”

A spokesperson for Trump's attorney defended her email use by arguing that she was unaware of record-keeping guidelines but that she had turned over her work-related emails to be archived as required. She “sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family,” the spokesperson told the Washington Post, which first reported Trump's use of personal email.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday dismissed the story as “fake news” and claimed his daughter’s private email use differed from that of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who exclusively used a private email for official business and was found to have sent and received classified information on that account.