House Oversight Committee Democrats will probe Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, over the use of private email accounts for official White House business, relaunching a 2017 investigation into whether officials in President Trump’s administration are complying with the Presidential Record Act, Fox News informed.
Committee Ranking Member Elijah Cummings stated that he wants more information about Ivanka Trump’s use of a personal email account while conducting official administration business.
“We launched a bipartisan investigation last year into White House officials’ use of private email accounts for official business, but the White House never gave us the information we requested,” Cummings said in a statement to Fox News. “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.”
President Trump addressed the email dustup, among other topics. “Ivanka did some emails. They weren’t classified like Hillary Clinton, they weren’t deleted like Hillary Clinton,” the President said, adding that Ivanka “wasn’t doing anything to hide her emails, They’re all in presidential records.”
The committee’s probe began in March 2017 under the joint leadership of Cummings and former committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, now a Fox News contributor. The committee subpoenaed information about Kushner, Trump’s husband, and his private email use. Last year, the White House claimed they couldn’t share details because they were conducting an internal review, according to the committee.
Kushner owned a private email account on the domain “ijkfamily.com,” according to a report. While Trump and Kushner both had a private domain names, they allegedly did not maintain their own server hardware to physically store the emails sent to it.
“My goal is to prevent this from happening again—not turn this into a spectacle the way Republicans went after Hillary Clinton,” Cummings said. “My main priority as chairman will be to focus on the issues that impact Americans in their everyday lives.”
The House Oversight Committee had jurisdiction over the years-long investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while conducting business as secretary of state. Republicans extensively investigated Clinton’s move to communicate classified information on an unsecured server and used it against her during the 2016 presidential election. Former FBI Director James Comey said Clinton’s behavior was “extremely careless,” but did not recommend any charges against her.
A source familiar with the committee’s investigation into Trump and Kushner told Fox News that according to statements from their attorneys, it appeared that the two White House officials did not comply with the law.
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