WASHINGTON — The president’s daughter and White House adviser, Ivanka Trump, said her use of a personal email account for government business was not the same as Hillary Clinton’s using a private email server, which the president and his supporters had long argued was illegal.
“There really is no equivalency,” Ms. Trump told ABC News in an interview that aired Wednesday in a defense that echoed what her father said earlier this month. Ms. Trump was asked if she should be locked up in prison as her father and his supporters chant about Ms. Clinton. “No,” Ms. Trump replied.
“People who want to see it as the same, see it as the same,” Ms. Trump said of the immediate comparisons drawn between the two women.
A recent White House review found that Ms. Trump used a personal email account multiple times in 2017 to conduct government business, a disclosure that immediately energized Democrats still angry over the 2016 presidential election, when Mrs. Clinton lost to Mr. Trump. One of the dominant issues of that campaign was the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private server while she was secretary of state.
Ms. Trump said that all of her emails from her private account were archived at the White House.
“All of my emails are stored and preserved,” Ms. Trump said in the interview, drawing a distinction from Mrs. Clinton’s situation. “There were no deletions. There is no attempt to hide.” She said it was not unusual for people to use private email accounts for personal reasons, such as coordinating with family, even as her father and husband work in the White House. She also said she had not deleted any of her personal emails.
While secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton stored classified information on a private server and used her private account for government work. When her practice was discovered, she made public her work-related emails and deleted some 30,000 personal messages.
The F.B.I. conducted an investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private server and did not recommend charges, a move that Mr. Trump capitalized on during the 2016 campaign and his time in the White House.
Mrs. Clinton’s deleted emails continue to enrage Mr. Trump, who raised it as recently as Tuesday in a Twitter post in which he criticized the continuing special counsel investigation into possible ties between his campaign and Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election.
Mr. Trump has defended his daughter. “These are all in the historical records,” he said earlier this month.
Ms. Trump’s email account use was “unlike Hillary Clinton” because of the private server that Mrs. Clinton had in her house, he said. “This was just early on when she came in,” Mr. Trump said of Ms. Trump’s emails.
Congressional Democrats have said they would investigate Ms. Trump’s practice next year when they assume the majority in the House. The House has already been conducting a bipartisan investigation into the use of private email accounts in the White House, prompted by disclosures that Ms. Trump’s husband, Jared Kushner, also used a private email account.
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