As you no doubt know by now, the Washington Post has recently reported that, in the early days of the administration, First Daughter, Ivanka Trump, used a personal email account for government business. While this has garnered promises of investigation — even from the GOP — and shouts of hypocrisy, and even “lock her up,” from the Left, echoing her father’s endless tirades against Hillary Clinton and her emails, there are some significant differences between the two “scandals.”
Given that Hillary’s email abuses were a cornerstone of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Ivanka’s use of a personal email to conduct White House business was certainly a bad idea, and was indeed against Federal laws, but, there is a lot of daylight between what she did, and what Hillary Clinton was accused of.
Hillary’s Emails Vs. Ivanka’s
Of course, President Trump immediately dismissed the acquisitions against his daughter, saying that Ivanka did nothing wrong.
Using private email to conduct any government business is against regulations, but not necessarily criminal, if no classified material was involved. That is one of the key differences between the two violations. While no charges were brought against HRC, largely due to her lack of “malicious intent,” those who think she should be prosecuted, think that way because, despite her original denials to the contrary, it did come out that she did indeed transmit classified information over her private server. In Ivanka’s case, The Washington Post, which broke the story, said that Trump’s team has “strongly denied” that Ivanka sent any classified information over the private system.
That stands in stark contrast to then-Secretary of State Clinton’s use of her private basement server. The FBI investigation into Clinton’s conduct found that she sent 110 classified emails over her private server, and “8 were classified at the Top Secret level.”
To use one of the favorite words of her father, another “huge” difference between Ivanka’s case and Hillary’s, is that according to WashPo, we are talking about a little over 100 emails, and there was no evidence that Ivanka did anything to hide or redact any of the information in them. Hillary’s email problems, on the other hand, involved over 30,000 emails that were deleted, or otherwise forensically “bleached.” Not to mention her physical destruction of cell phones, and other devices that may have held traces of the emails in question.
A third critical difference is the risk of interception. Besides for record keeping, the main reason why it is against the regulations to use personal email for government business is that such accounts are likely more vulnerable to hacks by foreign powers. Since Clinton was using her private account while conducting State Dept. business, her emails were much more “high-value targets” than Ivanka’s which, at the time, we’re only dealing with domestic issues, mostly involving the transition.
Ivanka should have known better. Her use of personal email did violate federal regulations, and she should be subject to investigation and any consequences of same. But, Hillary Clinton’s use of private emails was on a much grander scale and posed a far greater threat to national security. There are two wrongs here, but, not only do they not make a right, they are not equitable.
