During the 2016 presidential campaign, Republicans and the mainstream media obsessed over Hillary Clinton's email scandal. During her four years as Secretary of State, Clinton set up a private email server at her Chappaqua, New York home, which she used for all work-related and personal emails. Previous secretaries of state, such as Colin Powell, also used private email accounts, but that became out of step with current government practices. Clinton claimed she did so for "convenience."
At raucous rallies, Donald Trump slammed "Crooked Hillary" for this scandal, leading the crowd in a belligerent chant: "Lock her up! Lock her up! Lock her up!" The FBI investigated Clinton, and found no evidence of intentional misconduct, although she and her staff were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information." Despite Clinton being cleared of all criminal charges, Trump still insists that she's guilty, and his supporters still chant "Lock her up!"
It seemed extremely hypocritical, then, when reports broke last week that President Trump's daughter and advisor used a private email account for government business. The Washington Post stated, "Ivanka Trump sent hundreds of emails last year to White House aides, Cabinet officials and her assistants using a personal account, many of them in violation of federal records rules, according to people familiar with a White House examination of her correspondence."
Ivanka Trump used the account "throughout of much of 2017," a violation of her position as a government official. Considering the brouhaha over Clinton's private email scandal, observers wondered how the Trumps would react to their own private email scandal. President Trump defended his daughter, telling reporters, "They weren't classified like Hillary Clinton. They weren't deleted like Hillary Clinton. She wasn't doing that to hide her emails."
In an interview with Good Morning America, Ivanka Trump echoed her father's words, arguing her case was different. "There's no equivalency," she told ABC. "Everything has been preserved, everything has been archived. My emails have not been deleted, nor was there anything of substance, nothing confidential, within them. There's no connection between the two things."
As Politifact explains, a employee at a company managing Clinton's email server, not Hillary Clinton herself, deleted 33,000 emails in 2015. The deleted emails were investigated by the FBI and found to be all personal in nature. There is no evidence that they were deliberately deleted in reaction to a subpoena from the committee investigating Benghazi. In fact, Clinton's team requested that the emails be deleted before the subpoena request came.
When told that many people see their private email scandals as similar, Ivanka said, "People who want to see it as the same see it as the same. But the fact is that we all have private emails and personal emails to coordinate with our family." Ironically, this answer is also similar to what Hillary Clinton said. The former Secretary of State insisted her emails were private, relating topics such as her daughter's wedding, her mother's funeral and "yoga routines".
Ivanka Trump's representatives told The Washington Post that she didn't know the rules, which seems odd, since her father spent so much of his president campaign excoriating Clinton for using a private server. On GMA, Ivanka noted that there is "no prohibition from using private email as long as it's archived" and contains no classified information. When asked if the "lock her up" chant applies, she replied "No" and laughed.
Well, regardless of how big a deal you think these private email scandals are, you have to admit they are exposing some hypocrisy. Fox News hosts blasted Hillary about her private emails for months, but have not given Ivanka's private emails the same treatment.
