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Aaron P. Bernstein | Reuters
White House Senior Adviser Jared Kushner smiles as he arrives for his appearance before a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee as part of their probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, on Capitol Hill in Washington, U.S. July 24, 2017.
President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, used a personal email account to communicate with White House colleagues, Kushner’s attorney confirmed Sunday.
Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said that Kushner sent or returned fewer than 100 emails to colleagues in the White House from that account in the first eight months of the Trump administration. Lowell added that all non-personal emails were forwarded to Kushner’s official address.
“Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business. 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,” Lowell said in a statement.
She added that those emails 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.”
The news was first reported by Politico, which said Kushner used his private account — set up during the transition last December — alongside his official White House email account.
He traded emails with senior White House officials, outside advisers and others about media coverage, event planning and other subjects, Politico reported, citing sources familiar with the correspondence.
Politico said that people who have exchanged emails with Kushner on his personal account since Trump took office in January included former chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chief strategist Steve Bannon, National Economic Council director Gary Cohn and spokesman Josh Raffel.
There is no indication that Kushner had shared any sensitive or classified material on his private account, according to Politico.
Use of personal emails to conduct official business had dogged much of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run, and was a key talking point for Trump’s campaign.
As secretary of state, Clinton admittedly sent and received thousands of emails on her personal email account, using a server at her suburban New York home. That led to probes from the FBI to determine if the emails contained sensitive information.
