A pair of reports in the past day have revealed that Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, both advisers to Donald Trump, have used personal email accounts while working for the U.S. government, a behavior the president was extremely critical of during his campaign against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
From January through August 2016, as many as 100 emails either went to or came from Kushner’s personal email address, said Kushner’s lawyer Abbe Lowell in a statement Sunday reported by Politico, which first reported the story.
“These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal rather than his White House address,” Lowell said. Politico reports it has seen and verified more than twenty emails.
The website also reports that former chief strategist Steve Bannon and former chief of staff Reince Priebus also used private email accounts to correspond with Kushner, among others.
News of Ivanka Trump’s personal email use was revealed by a Freedom of Information Act request made by the nonprofit American Oversight, and was first reported Monday by Newsweek. The documents provided by American Oversight include emails to Linda McMahon from “Ivanka Kushner.”
At the time the emails were sent, February 28, Trump was working at the White House in a non-official capacity. However, she was attending White House meetings prior to becoming an official (yet unpaid) federal employee in March.
According to a White House spokesperson, Newsweek reports, one reason Trump became a federal employee was so she could “have access to government-issued communications devices and receive an official email account to protect government records.”