“Jared Kushner has finally officially registered as a member of the Republican Party, voting records show, despite working as a senior adviser for his father-in-law, President Trump, since the early days of his administration,” Vice News reports.
“It wasn’t until Sept. 20, 2018, that Kushner changed his New York City voter registration to ‘Republican’ from ‘no party’ on an updated registration form to vote in the midterms.”
Bloomberg: “Saudi Arabia and Egypt are unlikely to throw their weight behind the proposal being drawn up by Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and adviser, and White House Middle East peace negotiator Jason Greenblatt, according to interviews with key diplomats and analysts in Washington.”
“One diplomat described the initiative, which has yet to be made public, ‘hocus pocus’ and doubted whether Trump — who has raised questions about whether he supports a Palestinian state — cares about a negotiated settlement.”
“The House Oversight Committee on Thursday said it had obtained evidence that White House officials, including senior advisers Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, used personal email accounts and messaging applications, a pattern the panel said appeared to violate laws governing White House records,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Philip Bump notes the use of WhatsApp “is particularly problematic because messages are encrypted between users, meaning that unless Kushner and Ivanka Trump stored copies of their messages or the recipients turned the messages over to the government, there’s no way to record what was said.”
“House Democrats are discussing investigating the cash infusion the Kushner Companies’ flagship New York office tower received in summer 2018,” Axios reports.
“Jared Kushner’s family real estate business provides Democrats with a new opening to investigate a senior White House official’s indirect connection to foreign money. Kushner has been helping conduct Middle East policy on behalf of the U.S. government.”
“From a White House source, the House Oversight Committee has obtained documents related to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s security clearances that the Trump administration refused to provide,” Axios reports.
“The White House this week rejected the committee’s request for documents on the process for granting security clearances to staffers. But the House Oversight Committee in early February had already obtained the leaked documents that detail the entire process, from the spring of 2017 to the spring of 2018, on how both Kushner and Trump were ultimately granted their security clearances.”
“President Trump ordered his chief of staff to grant his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, a top-secret security clearance last year, overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House’s top lawyer,” the New York Times reports.
“Mr. Trump’s decision in May so troubled senior administration officials that at least one, the White House chief of staff at the time, John Kelly, wrote a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been ‘ordered’ to give Mr. Kushner the top-secret clearance.”
“The White House counsel at the time, Donald McGahn, also wrote an internal memo outlining the concerns that had been raised about Mr. Kushner — including by the C.I.A. — and how Mr. McGahn had recommended that he not be given a top-secret clearance.”
“The disclosure of the memos contradicts statements made by the president, who told the New York Times in January in an Oval Office interview that he had no role in his son-in-law receiving his clearance.”
“White House adviser Jared Kushner made a whirlwind visit this week to rally U.S.-allied Gulf Arab allies to support his still- unannounced Middle East peace plan, the leaked contours of which suggest little has been done to address Arab demands,” Reuters reports.
“Kushner’s approach to ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not appear to have progressed since his last regional tour in June, focusing largely on economic initiatives at the expense of a land-for-peace deal long central to the official Arab position.”
President Trump’s campaign has spent nearly $100,000 of donor money to pay legal bills to the firm representing Jared Kushner, ABC News reports.
“Low dollar contributions – $200 or less – made up 98.5 percent of the total funds raised by the Trump campaign in the last quarter of 2018, a consistent trend throughout the year… Kushner is a real estate scion who earned more than $1.7 million in income in 2015… His net worth has been estimated at more than $300 million.”
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie said that Jared Kushner “was still ‘seething’ from events that took place more than a decade prior — when Christie, as a U.S. attorney, prosecuted Kushner’s father, Charles, for tax evasion, witness tampering and illegal campaign contributions, sending the elder Kushner to prison for 14 months,” the Washington Post reports.
Said Christie: “It’s one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney. And I was a U.S. attorney in New Jersey — so we had some loathsome and disgusting crime going on there!”
“There is simply no one more influential in the White House on the president than Jared Kushner. He’s not the only person who he listens to, but I don’t think anyone has more influence than Jared has.”
— Former Gov. Chris Christie (R), in an interview with NPR.
“Jared Kushner spoke up at a recent Oval Office meeting about cutting a deal to end the government shutdown, which has been the latest project for President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser,” the Washington Post reports.
“After listening to Kushner expound on policy and possible areas of compromise with Democrats, Trump glanced at the others in the room. ‘Apparently, Jared has become an expert on immigration in the last 48 hours,’ Trump said.”
“The remark, described by one White House official as playful, underscored the latest power shift inside the White House: Kushner has emerged as an omnipresent and assertive player in the now-33-day impasse, despite deep skepticism on Capitol Hill about his political abilities and influence.”
“Chris Christie, who was ousted as chairman of Donald Trump’s White House transition team in 2016, has written a blistering attack on Jared Kushner, whom he accuses of having carried out a political ‘hit job’ on him as an act of revenge for prosecuting his father, Charles Kushner, a decade ago,” the Guardian reports.
“In his soon to be published book, Let Me Finish, Christie unleashes both barrels on Trump’s son-in-law… Christie blames this key player in the president’s inner circle for his ignominious dismissal shortly after Trump’s election victory in November 2016.”
As Steve Bannon confessed to Christie: “The kid’s been taking an ax to your head with the boss ever since I got here.”
“Even for a White House that has generated an extraordinary cornucopia of hypercritical kiss-and-tell books, Christie’s is exceptional for its excoriating description of events at which he was present… It is also exceptional as a chronicle of the score-settling and animosity that drove key decision-making in Trump’s nascent presidency.”
“Inside the West Wing, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has been lobbying for restraint,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
“Declaring a national emergency, an option Mr. Trump has been leaning toward, shouldn’t be used to try to win a messaging war against Democrats opposed to a wall, Mr. Kushner said in a recent Oval Office meeting.”
“Instead, Mr. Kushner argued an emergency should be invoked only if it creates a clear path for the White House to build the wall, the key issue in the standoff between Mr. Trump and congressional Democrats that has led to the shutdown.”
Daily Beast: “Shortly after the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was handed a task considered critical to the president’s operations. In addition to serving as a senior adviser in the White House, he would also be playing the role of the main conduit between Trump and his friend David Pecker, the National Enquirer publisher and chief executive of AMI, which prosecutors said on Wednesday admitted to making a $150,000 hush-money payment ‘in concert with’ the Trump campaign.”
“During the early months of the Trump era, Kushner performed the task admirably, discussing with Pecker various issues over the phone, including everything from international relations to media gossip… Pecker, for his part, bragged to people that he was speaking to the president’s son-in-law and, more generally, about the level of access he had to the upper echelons of the West Wing.”
“Senior American officials were worried. Since the early months of the Trump administration, Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and Middle East adviser, had been having private, informal conversations with Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the favorite son of Saudi Arabia’s king,” the New York Times reports.
“Given Mr. Kushner’s political inexperience, the private exchanges could make him susceptible to Saudi manipulation… In an effort to tighten practices at the White House, a new chief of staff tried to reimpose longstanding procedures stipulating that National Security Council staff members should participate in all calls with foreign leaders.”
“But even with the restrictions in place, Mr. Kushner, 37, and Prince Mohammed, 33, kept chatting… In fact, they said, the two men were on a first-name basis, calling each other Jared and Mohammed in text messages and phone calls.”
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s sentencing memo for Michael Flynn “should give pause to members of Trump’s inner circle – especially the president’s son-in-law and senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner,” Tim O’Brien writes.
“Mueller’s memo noted that federal investigators’ curiosity about Flynn’s role in the presidential transition seemed to have been sparked by a Washington Post account of a conversation he had with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak… But the meat of what should worry Team Trump is in Mueller’s disclosure that Flynn has provided firsthand information about interactions between the transition team and Russian government officials.”
“The timeline around Flynn’s conversations is crucial because it shows what’s still in play for the president and Kushner… Kushner’s actions are also interesting because the Federal Bureau of Investigation has examined his own communications with Kislyak – and Kushner reportedly encouraged Trump to fire his FBI director, James Comey, last spring when Comey was still in the early stages of digging into the Trump-Russia connection.”
“Outgoing Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto has stunned the country by bestowing the nation’s highest honor for foreigners on Jared Kushner,” The Guardian reports.
Peña Nieto praised Kushner as “a grand ally of Mexico” who helped achieve a renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico.
“Is there anything that qualifies Jared Kushner to be dealing with any of these issues? He’s an unsuccessful real estate developer who inherited millions of dollars and married the president’s daughter. He’s completely unqualified. This is gross nepotism and it’s just an embarrassment that he has any power at all.”
— Jeffrey Toobin, quoted by The Hill.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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