The revelation that Ivanka Trump used personal email for work has drawn criticism and calls for investigations and been seen as ill-advised and potentially hypocritical amid the president's relentless and still ongoing attacks against Hillary Clinton over her own email system. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images white house Ivanka Trump says 'no equivalency' between her personal email use and Clinton's

White House adviser Ivanka Trump’s use of a personal email account to conduct official administration business has “no connection” to Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server as secretary of State, the president's daughter argued this week, because she followed the correct protocols for such email use.

In an interview with ABC News’ Deborah Roberts broadcast on Wednesday, Trump said “there really is no equivalency” between her occasional use of a personal email account and Clinton’s exclusive use of a personal email server during her tenure at the State Department, a scandal that dogged Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign and over which the president called for her jailing.


The Washington Post reported last week that Trump used a personal email account to communicate with White House officials before and after she joined her father's administration. At the time, a spokesperson for Trump's attorney claimed she was unaware of preservation policies regarding personal email use and said that she has since turned over all of her work-related messages for recordkeeping.

The revelation has drawn criticism and renewed bipartisan calls from Capitol Hill for investigations into the Trump administration’s use of personal email or other encrypted technology to conduct government business, seen as ill-advised and potentially hypocritical amid the president's relentless and ongoing attacks against Clinton over her email system.

In her interview, conducted Tuesday, Trump insisted that “there was nothing of substance, nothing confidential” in the emails she sent and received on her personal account, suggesting to Roberts that many related to logistical and scheduling concerns “to help coordinate” with her family.

On the occasion she received an email “that may have a political implication, I would then just forward it to my work account — that is the protocol, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” she said.

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Asked how she could reconcile her email use with criticisms of Clinton, Trump argued that unlike Clinton, she never deleted any emails or shared any classified information over her personal account, as the former secretary of State was found to have done. Trump also claimed that there was “no intent to circumvent” preservation and recordkeeping protocols.

“People who want to see it as the same see it as the same,” Trump said, later adding, “there's no equivalency to what my father's spoken about."

She reiterated that “there is no restriction of using personal email. 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.”