Presidential son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner has corresponded with other administration officials about White House matters through a private email account set up during the transition last December, Politico reported on Sunday.
According to the report, Kushner uses his private account alongside his official White House email account, sometimes trading emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, said four people familiar with the correspondence.
Politico has seen and verified about two dozen emails.
“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business,” Abbe Lowell, a lawyer for Kushner, said in a statement Sunday.
“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,” added Lowell.
Aides who have exchanged emails with Kushner on his private account since President Donald Trump took office in January include former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn, and spokesman Josh Raffel, according to emails described to or shown to Politico. In some cases, those White House officials have emailed Kushner’s account first, said people familiar with the messages.
The report stressed there is no indication that Kushner has shared any sensitive or classified material on his private account, or that he relies on his private email account more than his official White House account to conduct government business. Aides said he prefers to call or text over using email.
Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, set up their private family domain late last year before moving to Washington from New York, according to people with knowledge of events as well as publicly available internet registration records. At the time, Kushner was expected to be named to a White House role.
Kushner's representatives declined to detail the server or security measures on it.
People familiar with the account say it was primarily set up for Kushner’s personal communications, but he has used it to communicate with acquaintances outside the White House about matters relating to Trump and the administration, according to people who have received messages, as well as with his White House colleagues.
Ivanka Trump, now an assistant to the president, has an email account on the same domain, they said. Politico had not seen Ivanka Trump’s correspondence, and there is no indication that she used her account to discuss government business.
Lowell stressed Kushner has adhered to government record-keeping requirements by forwarding all the emails to his account.
The use of personal email accounts in the Trump White House has been somewhat common, the website noted, even though the president has been a harsh critic of his rival Hillary Clinton’s private email habits.
Clinton was the target of an extensive FBI investigation, overseen by former FBI Director James Comey, into whether she mishandled classified material by sending or receiving it via her non-government email address.
Comey determined that Clinton should not be indicted in the email probe, though he dropped a bombshell when he informed Congress days before the election that the FBI had discovered emails in a separate investigation that could be connected to the Clinton investigation.
The FBI subsequently said it would not change its initial determination in the Clinton email probe, but Clinton still claims that Comey’s actions cost her the presidency.