Ivanka Trump is no Hillary Clinton — but that won’t stop the media and Democrats from falsely equating their use of government emails in yet another attempt to whitewash the dubious past of their 2016 presidential nominee.
In fact, the news about Ivanka Trump’s use of an email account compared to Hillary Clinton’s clear violation of federal records-keeping statutes is about as different as jaywalking is from grand larceny. It was first addressed in The Washington Post, which released a report alleging that the President’s daughter had used a personal email account to conduct official government business, almost all of it related to logistics and scheduling for her family.
Mainstream media organizations tried to establish a parallel to Clinton’s use of a private server to send and receive classified information, but that comparison falls woefully short.
In their reporting, they neglected to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton endangered our national security by mishandling classified information, and then tried to cover it up by using BleachBit to purge her server of tens of thousands of emails.
When the inspectors general of the State Department and the Intelligence Community reviewed 40 of Clinton’s emails and found that four did contain classified information, they were forced to refer the case to the FBI. Upon further investigation, the FBI found that more than 2,000 of the 30,490 emails Clinton turned over to the State Department contained classified information, including 110 emails in 52 email chains that contained classified information at the time they were sent or received.
When the authorities learned that Clinton had her own private email server under lock and key, her attorneys went into crisis mode and started deleting emails they didn’t want investigators to find. According to the FBI “it’s also likely that there are other work-related emails that they did not produce to State and that we did not find elsewhere, and that are now gone because they deleted all emails they did not produce to State, and the lawyers then cleaned their devices in such a way as to preclude complete forensic recovery.”
Hillary Clinton was the Secretary of State, the highest-ranking member of Barack Obama’s cabinet, and she deliberately abused the people’s trust. She blatantly defied the protocols for keeping classified information secure and endangered the security of our entire country in an apparent attempt to shield herself from open-records laws.
Ivanka Trump’s case is completely different.
“All of my emails are stored and preserved. There were no deletions. There is no attempt to hide,” Ivanka said in a recent interview.
“There’s no equivalency to what my father’s spoken about… There is no restriction of using personal email,” she added. “In fact, we’re instructed that if we receive an email to our personal account that could relate to government work, you simply just forward it to your government account so it can be archived.”
Ivanka is not the Secretary of State, and she did not send or receive classified information using her personal account. And even when she did use her personal account for official correspondence, she forwarded it to her government account to ensure that it would be archived, rather than squirreling it away on a private server tucked away in a private, undisclosed location.
Hillary Clinton famously tried to brush off questions about the 30,000 emails she had painstakingly deleted from her server by claiming that they were mostly about things like “family vacations” and “yoga routines.” Her excuse proved as absurd as it sounded — but when Ivanka’s emails become public, don’t be surprised if they actually are mostly about mundane personal and family activities.
By equating Ivanka Trump with Hillary Clinton, the Democrats and the media are continuing to trivialize Clinton’s real misuse of classified information and the significant danger it posed to American national security. Perhaps their rapid change in tune is nothing more than an attempt to score some quick points at the expense of a real controversy.
The left will do everything they can to distort the truth, but in the end, Ivanka Trump is no Hillary Clinton.
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Alana Roethle is the elected Secretary of the Kansas Republican Party and a political contributor who has been featured on media outlets such as Fox News and the BBC. She and her husband are raising their four children in Leawood, KS.
