Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser, used a personal email account to discuss official government business, despite his father-in-law’s criticism of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for doing the same, according to multiple reports.
The email account was set up in December, Politico reported, noting that Kushner also uses an official White House email account. The news site was the first to report on Kushner's use of private email.
"Fewer than 100 emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account," Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said Sunday in a statement to Politico. "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."
Credit: Alex Brandon
Credit: Alex Brandon
Trump, who faced Clinton last year in the race for the White House, criticized the former secretary of state numerous times for her use of private email, leading supporters on chants of “Lock her up” and insisting that her actions were illegal. The FBI determined last year that Clinton did not break the law, although then-FBI Director James Comey said that Clinton and her colleagues were "extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.”
Politico reported that there were no indications that Kushner used his private email account to discuss sensitive or classified information.
An unidentified government official told The New York Times that "unlike in the Clinton case, Mr. Kushner had not set up a private server to house the personal email account. While Mrs. Clinton used her personal account exclusively, the official said that Mr. Kushner does use his government account."
At a news briefing on Monday, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that, to her knowledge, Kushner’s use of private email was “very limited.”
“White House counsel has instructed all White House staff to use their government email for government matters,” she said, adding that staff was “instructed on this one pretty regularly.”
Government officials are required to keep records of their correspondence under federal law. Lowell told the Times that all White House-related emails were forwarded to Kusner's official government address in order to create a record of the correspondence.
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