Hopefully, one day all of them will be tried, convicted and hung (think Nuremberg). But what is it that Jared Kushner, a mental midget, is supposed to be doing?He has more jobs than anyone else in the history of the presidency. Officially he's Senior Advisor to the fake "president." He's been tasked with the following 10 big jobs:
• brokering peace between Israel and Palestine• leading the White House office of innovation• solving the opioid crisis• overseeing information technology contracting• overseeing Veterans' Affairs (at least, it is said, in terms of politics)• sucking up to Saudi Arabia so that they buy US weapons• overseeing U.S. relations with Mexico• overseeing U.S. relations with China• reforming the criminal justice system• getting super-rich people to finance Trump's reelection campaign
I wonder how much time he's had to put into reading Vicky Ward's brand new (out yesterday) book, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. In his review for the Washington Post, Michael Kranish noted that "There are no blockbuster revelations here regarding Kushner’s meeting with a Russian banker or his involvement in a meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower, two issues that have drawn the interest of investigators. Ward is, however, particularly critical of Trump’s decision to hand over Middle East policy to Kushner, which led to clashes with then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and others."
Ward delves into questions about whether Kushner misused his role as a way to find financing to rescue a Fifth Avenue property in Manhattan and suggests that Kushner dim-wittedly nearly dragged the United States into a war in the Middle East. It is a dark and mostly one-sided portrait, one with which the Kushner and Trump families no doubt will disagree.In the text, while Ward hammers the couple on page after page, she doesn’t explicitly accuse them of corruption as defined by legal statutes. Perhaps the closest she comes is when she writes that “it’s been reported” that Ivanka Trump oversaw her family’s project in Azerbaijan in which a partner’s brother had been described in a U.S. diplomatic cable as corrupt.“As a result, it’s possible that the Trump Organization violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act,” Ward writes, providing a notable hedge.To be sure, Trump and his family have thrown around such concepts loosely, and without hedging. During the 2016 campaign, he called Hillary Clinton the “Most Corrupt Candidate Ever!” retweeting an image that encased the words in a Jewish star against a backdrop of U.S. currency, a tweet widely criticized as anti-Semitic. (Trump said he thought it was a sheriff’s star.) Clinton, like Jared and Ivanka, has not been charged by prosecutors with corruption.Ward, who relies heavily on the reporting of others (noted in endnotes), as well as her own sources, has a tendency, particularly in the first half of the book, to make sweeping statements and repeat rumors, some of which she then bats down. She writes that one man “was rumored to sleep with men and hired prostitutes,” and says another was “not one to be troubled by ethics.”Ward paints a sordid portrait of Kushner’s coming of age, retelling tales of how his father’s contributions to Harvard University may have greased his way into the college. A war within the Kushner family led his father, Charles Kushner, to arrange for a prostitute to entrap a relative with whom he had feuded. Charles Kushner went to prison for his part in the scheme and for other matters. Jared later told New York magazine that his father’s viewpoint was: “You’re trying to make my life miserable? Well, I’m doing the same.”To rehabilitate the family image, Ward writes, the elder Kushner adopted a plan that called for transitioning from owning garden apartments in New Jersey to acquiring a Fifth Avenue office tower, a “trophy” that would dazzle the doubters. In addition, Jared would buy the New York Observer to get friendly media treatment, and he would “date someone prominent.” While the father pulled the strings, the son got the credit-- and later the blame-- for buying the nation’s most expensive office property just before the Great Recession, leaving him with staggering debt. As for the prominent woman, Kushner dated Ivanka Trump.Donald Trump was not pleased at first, according to Ward. “Why couldn’t she have married Tom Brady?” he said, referring to the New England Patriots quarterback, Ward writes. “Have you seen how he throws a football?”Who would you rather marry?In the rather cynical portrait Ward draws, Ivanka, too, was strategic. Ward quotes her as saying in her own book, “The Trump Card”: “If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is in fact true.”When Trump said there were “very fine people, on both sides” of a Charlottesville, Virginia, clash during which white supremacists shouted “Jews will not replace us,” Trump’s economic adviser Gary Cohn threatened to resign, noting that some of his family members had been killed in the Holocaust. Ivanka urged him to stay, telling him: “My dad’s not a racist. He didn’t mean any of it; he’s not anti-Semitic,” according to Ward. Cohn remained in his post.At first, Jared and Ivanka didn’t plan to work in the White House, but after Trump brought them in as advisers, they frequently clashed with chief strategist Stephen Bannon and others. An “epic” and profane fight took place between Bannon and Ivanka over who was leaking stories, Ward writes.“Everybody knows you leak,” Bannon is reported to have told Ivanka.“You’re a fucking liar,” she is said to have responded. “Everything that comes out of your mouth is a fucking lie.”“Go fuck yourself.... You are nothing,” Bannon reportedly said.The president, according to Ward, eventually wanted to send Jared and Ivanka back to New York, but after so many firings and resignations in the White House, he needed them more than ever.
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