Throughout the presidential campaign few things got Donald Trump and his supporters more riled up than aggressively attacking Hillary Clinton for using a private email server while she was secretary of state (“lock her up,” they liked to chant). Now it turns out that Jared Kushner has been using a private email address to conduct government business ever since his father-in-law moved in to the White House, according to Politico. And this wasn’t just an old address that maybe some people mistakenly used to reach one of the president’s most senior advisers, it was a private email account that Kushner set up during the transition in December.
Politico says it has “seen and verified” around two dozen emails that Kushner traded with “senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects.”
Kushner has used the private account to trade emails with, among others, former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, and spokesman Josh Raffel.
Kushner is not denying that he uses a private email account sometimes but his lawyer blamed it on other people. “Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement. “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. 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.”
There is no indication that Kushner has discussed any classified material through the private email address or that he uses it more than his official White House account. Although Ivanka Trump also has an email account on the same domain as her husband, so far there is no evidence that she has used it to discuss official business.
