First Lady Melania Trump has used personal email accounts in the White House, according to an interview with her former friend, Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.
Trump’s former friend and senior adviser is preparing to release a new tell-all memoir, Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady.
In an exclusive interview with The Washington Post, Winston Wolkoff said that neither she nor the first lady used their assigned White House emails. The newspaper viewed messages from Trump that came from a private Trump Organization account, an email from the MelaniaTrump.com domain, iMessage and Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
According to the report, the messages included discussions about government hiring, contracts, detailed schedules during state visits, logistics of White House events and finances for the presidential inauguration.
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Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, as well as Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross have all been investigated by the House Oversight Committee for their use of private accounts to conduct government business. President Donald Trump built his 2016 campaign around chants of “Lock her up!” He constantly criticized Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state.
While the first lady is not a government employee, ethics lawyers note that if she is conducting government business, it should be done using a White House email address. Messages sent using those accounts are preserved under the Presidential Records Act.
Personal email use is allowed under the act, but the records must be carefully maintained.
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Winston Wolkoff told The Post that she did not include information on the first lady’s private email use in her book because she “just had so much” to write about.
The former New York City event planner and senior Vogue staffer was ousted from the White House after investigations into spending surrounding the presidential inauguration. She participated in the subsequent investigations. She was paid nearly a half-million dollars for producing its festivities.
Winston Wolkoff has also said that she has multiple tapes of Melania Trump disparaging Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, who the author claims the first lady enjoyed calling “Princess.”
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