If our nation is proficient in any category it’s our innate ability to set the precedent for double standards in terms of our actions. We condemn violence and seek to end the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, of the $1.6 trillion spent globally on military operating costs, the U.S. accounts for 37% of that total. We call ourselves the land of the free, a place where opportunity need only the will to create and privilege you either are/aren’t born into. Lastly, as it relates to today’s lesson, we lambasted Hillary Clinton for using her personal email address to conduct business while serving as secretary of state, ultimately costing her the 2016 US Presidential election, and when recent reports show that Ivanka Trump, daughter, and adviser President Trump, committed the same act, no significant red flags were raised.
Several weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that Ivanka had sent hundreds of emails in 2017 to White House aides, Cabinet officials, and several of her assistants using a personal email account. Ms. Trump’s ethics counsel, Abbe Lowell immediately responded to these allegations with justifications that sounded eerily like excuses:
“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.”
–Abbe Lowell, White House Ethics Counsel
Having clearly received coaching from Lowell, Trump told ABC News that every email she sent contained information pertaining solely “logistics and managing the fact that I have a home life, and a work life.” The only discernible difference between allegations made against Ivanka and previous accusations of Hillary Clinton is that the latter individual stored her emails on a private server in her Chappaqua, NY home, not on the White House server.
This distinction has been the basis for Ivanka’s argument that she’s done nothing wrong. Trump, in her interview with ABC, explained that “we all have private emails and personal emails to coordinate with our family” and “there’s no prohibition from using private email as long as it’s archived and as long as there’s nothing in it that’s classified.” Ivanka Trump knows how to answer to criticism, I’ll give her that.
So the question is should we give Ivanka Trump the same flack given to Hillary for her email scandal?
If we should find an answer to that question, let us first look at the facts. According to President Trump, all of Ivanka’s emails “are in presidential records,” and unlike Clinton, Ms. Trump didn’t create a private server for her emails, nor has any classified information been discovered in the contents of her correspondence. Austin Evers, executive director American Oversight, a liberal watchdog group, repeatedly submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, demanding an investigation into Ivanka Trump’s email usage, which ultimately led to the Washington Post’s discovery.
“There’s the obvious hypocrisy that her father ran on the misuse of personal email as a central tenet of his campaign. There is no reasonable suggestion that she didn’t know better. Clearly, everyone joining the Trump administration should have been on high alert about personal email use.”
–Austin Evers, Executive Director, American Oversight
Given that during Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Trump implicated that Clinton’s email scandal was on par, corruption-wise, “on a scale we have never seen before,” calling it “bigger than Watergate,” one would think Ivanka would be just a bit more careful than the media shows she actually was. While the negative attention being given to Ms. Trump is undoubtedly unpleasant, and will most likely be a topic of discussion when the Democrat-run House takes office later this year, as a country, we need to stop creating double-standards. If the use of personal email accounts for sending government information is condemnable for one person, this needs to be applied to all who fail to adhere to this standard.
