Dershowitz: Ivanka Trump personal email use is ‘hypocrisy on parade,’ but ‘everybody uses private emails’

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz on Tuesday said that Ivanka Trump defending her use of a private email account while in the White House is hypocritical, but that the use of private emails is widespread among public figures and should not be criminalized.

“Well, I think it’s hypocrisy on parade,” Dershowitz said in an appearance on Fox News. “Each side uses whatever arguments they can to help and bolster their partisan position.”

{mosads}”Look, everybody uses private email,” he said. “We now have a list of probably a dozen people in public life who have used emails.”

In this particular case, Dershowitz, who is a contributor at The Hill, said he thought the email use was especially unproblematic. 

“Apparently Ivanka Trump used the emails only for scheduling purposes, there was no classified material, the emails are all preserved,” Dershowitz, who has frequently backed the Trump administration on legal issues, said. “It’s a nonissue, just partisan bickering.”

“We should not be criminalizing the use of private emails, whether by Hillary Clinton or by Ivanka Trump and we should put that issue behind us.”

The Washington Post reported Monday that Trump violated federal records rules by sending emails to government officials on her personal account in 2017.

A spokesperson for Trump’s attorney and ethics counsel Abbe Lowell, Peter Mirijanian, said she “sometimes used her personal account, almost always for logistics and scheduling concerning her family.”

Mirijanian added that “no classified information was ever included … and no emails were ever deleted” from her account.

According to him, all “the emails have been retained in the official account in conformity with records preservation laws and rules.”

The revelation of Trump’s email use immediately raised parallels to Hillary Clinton‘s use of a private email server when she worked as secretary of State.

Clinton used a personal email as her primary means of correspondence for official business serving as secretary of State in the Obama administration.

A swath of emails also disappeared from Clinton’s private account during the investigation into her use of the email account. 

She has also said that she did not use the email to move classified information. 

The issue was a big one for President Trump during his campaign and his supporters still chant “Lock her up!” at his rallies in reference to Clinton.