Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Declares Ivanka Trump's Email Use a 'Non-Issue'
Harvard Law School Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz contended on Tuesday that first daughter Ivanka Trump’s use of a private email account during the opening months of the new administration is a “non-issue.”
Fox News host Bill Hemmer asked Dershowitz what he thought of congressional Democrats promising to investigate the matter.
“Well, I think it’s hypocrisy on parade. Each side uses whatever argument they can to help and bolster their partisan position,” the legal scholar replied. “Look, everybody uses private emails. We now have a list of probably a dozen people in public life who have used emails.”
Dershowitz then made a distinction between Trump’s limited use of a private email account and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private, unsecured email server while she was head of the State Department.
“Apparently, Ivanka Trump used the emails only for scheduling purposes,” he said. “There was no classified material. The emails were all preserved. It’s a non-issue. It’s just partisan bickering.”
“We should not be criminalizing the use of private emails, whether by Hillary Clinton or by Ivanka Trump. We should put that issue behind us,” Dershowitz added.
In announcing that Clinton would not be charged for mishandling classified information in July 2016, former FBI Director James Comey nonetheless characterized her actions as “extremely careless.”
“Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information,” he said.
Comey further revealed the FBI “discovered several thousand work-related e-mails” that Clinton did not turn over to the State Department, seemingly in clear violation of the Federal Records Act. Thousands were deleted, but retrieved by FBI investigators.
The Washington Post reported that Trump sent hundreds of emails in 2017 using her private email account with a domain she shares with husband Jared Kushner.
White House spokesman Peter Mirijanian told The Post that Trump never used her email to send classified information, but for family scheduling and logistics.
“While transitioning into government, after she was given an official account but until the White House provided her the same guidance they had given others who started before she did, Ms. Trump sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family,” he said in a statement.
Mirijanian added that she turned over her government-related emails months ago, so they could be stored permanently with other White House records.
“Ms. Trump did not create a private server in her house or office, no classified information was ever included, the account was never transferred at Trump Organization, and no emails were ever deleted,” he further pointed out.
Before departing the White House for Florida on Tuesday, President Donald Trump told reporters his daughter’s use of a private email account was very different than Clinton’s.
“They weren’t classified like Hillary Clinton. They weren’t deleted like Hillary Clinton, who deleted 33,000,” he said of the emails in question.
President Trump defends daughter Ivanka’s personal email use, says she’d didn’t delete her emails like Hillary Clinton https://t.co/LIiM4ewGAU pic.twitter.com/9qlK8FZRAc
— CBS News (@CBSNews) November 20, 2018
Trump continued, “She wasn’t doing anything to hide her emails. I looked at it just very briefly today and the presidential records — they’re all in presidential records. There was no hiding.”
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