Jared Kushner, senior White House adviser and son-in-law of President Donald Trump, has occasionally used a private email account for correspondence with fellow administration officials, his lawyer, Abbe Lowell, confirmed to CNN on Sunday.
“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Lowell said in a statement. “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.”
Politico first reported Kushner’s use of a private account and said it was set up in December and was used to sometimes trade emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers, and some others about media coverage.
During his campaign, Trump repeatedly criticized Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server to send and receive email during her time as secretary of state.
Lowell said that the emails on Kushner’s private account were “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.”
Federal law requires that all White House records be preserved, including emails.
Regarding concerns that some of the emails might not have been preserved since Kushner was not using a White House account, Lowell said: “All non-personal emails were forwarded to his official address, and all have been preserved, in any event.”
Kushner is married to Trump’s eldest daughter, Ivanka Trump, and was recently in the spotlight following reports that some of Trump’s legal team had advised Kusher to step down from his role as White House adviser to protect the President from legal scrutiny over his associates’ interactions with Russians.
The White House pushed back against the reports, including White House press secretary Sarah Sanders, who said there was “certainly no presentation” on the issue, when asked if the lawyers discussed that option.
Ivanka Trump, now a senior White House adviser, also used her private email to correspond within the administration before she joined it.
Documents obtained by watchdog group American Oversight via a Freedom of Information Act request found two emails sent by Trump’s private email address to Small Business Administrator Linda McMahon on the topic of women’s entrepreneurship.
The emails were sent February 28, nearly a month before Trump formally stepped into her White House role as assistant to the President, however, she referred to White House staffer Julie Radford as “my chief of staff” in one of the emails.