Jared Kushner Used Private Email In Trump Administration, Lawyer Confirms

Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, reportedly set up a private email account as their family was coming into power in Washington. They’re seen here last week at left, sitting with Lara Trump and Eric Trump.

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Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, reportedly set up a private email account as their family was coming into power in Washington. They’re seen here last week at left, sitting with Lara Trump and Eric Trump.

Drew Angerer/Getty Images

White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner has used both a private email account and an official email address to communicate with other government officials, his attorney says. Responding to media reports about Kushner’s email habits, his lawyer said, “All non-personal emails were forwarded to his official address.”

The emails between Kushner’s personal account and his White House colleagues number fewer than 100, according to Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, in a statement relayed to us by NPR’s Tamara Keith. Lowell said, “Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business.”

Emails have been a central theme for Kushner’s father-in-law, President Trump, who has repeatedly said that Democratic rival Hillary Clinton should face federal criminal charges over her use of private email while serving as secretary of State.

In the aftermath of the hotly contested 2016 presidential campaign, new emphasis is placed on how officials handle email. Politico reported on Kushner’s use of a private web domain and email account Sunday, while also clarifying that there aren’t signs that the presidential aide has used the account to handle classified or sensitive materials.

Hillary Clinton has said that she didn’t use her personal account to send or receive materials marked classified, either — but her routine use of the account for official business set off questions about documents that could potentially be retroactively declared secret, as well as concerns over how tens of thousands of emails and records from a private server might be properly archived in the government’s system.

In Kushner’s case, it appears that he set up the email to handle unofficial communications. But the president’s son-in-law has come under scrutiny of his own, due to his official duties as well as his becoming a figure in the Justice Department’s ongoing investigation into Russia’s tampering in the 2016 campaign. He said in July that he “did not collude” with any foreign government.

Similar to Clinton’s establishment of her private account and email server as she was joining President Obama’s administration, Politico reports that Kushner set up a private family domain as he and his family were moving into power in Washington.

Here’s the full statement from Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell:

“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business. Fewer than a hundred 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. 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. All non-personal emails were forwarded to his official address and all have been preserved in any event.”

Article source: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/09/25/553427374/jared-kushner-used-private-email-in-trump-administration-lawyer-confirms?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=news

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