“A real estate company part-owned by Jared Kushner has received $90m in foreign funding from an opaque offshore vehicle since he entered the White House as a senior adviser to his father-in-law Donald Trump,” the Guardian reports.
“Investment has flowed from overseas to the company, Cadre, while Kushner works as an international envoy for the US… The money came through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven that guarantees corporate secrecy.”
Jared Kushner wouldn’t answer Jonathan Swan directly when asked if he disapproves of President Trump’s promotion of birtherism:
SWAN: Have you ever seen him say or do anything that you would describe as racist or bigoted?
KUSHNER: So, the answer is un — uh, no. Absolutely not. You can’t not be a racist for 69 years, then run for president and be a racist. What I’ll say is that, when a lot of the Democrats call the president a racist, I think they’re doing a disservice to people who suffer because of real racism in this country.
SWAN: Was birtherism racist?
KUSHNER: Um, look I wasn’t really involved in that.
SWAN: I know you weren’t. Was it racist?
KUSHNER: Like I said, I wasn’t involved in that.
SWAN: I know you weren’t. Was it racist?
KUSHNER: I know who the president is, and I have not seen anything in him that is racist. So, again, I was not involved in that.
SWAN: Did you wish he didn’t do that?
KUSHNER: Like I said, I was not involved in that. That was a long time ago.
Aaron Blake: “So for Kushner to dismiss it as trivial is to bury his own head in the sand. Kushner may not be a senior White House adviser without it. But of course, he didn’t really dismiss it; he actively sought to distance himself from it — which pretty much says it all.”
Jared Kushner told Axios on HBO that he doesn’t know whether he’d call the FBI if he were to receive an email today like the one before the campaign’s Trump Tower meeting, which had the subject line: “Re: Russia – Clinton – private and confidential.”
Kushner said this after a tense exchange about the email he received to set up the infamous Trump Tower meeting.
New York Times: “They are there before 7 a.m. to catch Ms. Trump and Mr. Kushner departing for work. After switching shifts midday, they are also there at 8 p.m., when the couple usually return home. This repeats itself most days, including weekends and holidays.”
“Neighbors don’t seem to mind or even take notice. That’s because Kalorama already has its share of high-profile officials, with as many black town cars and Chevy Suburbans idling on its leafy drives as one might see in gangster’s cortège.”
“The paparazzi stay sandwiched between the Secret Service detail guarding the Trump-Kushner residence and another detail guarding the Obamas, who live a block away… Still, it’s a somniferous situation for the photographers, who camp out in their cars for hours at a time for a few seconds of activity.”
“Shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Paul Manafort wrote to Jared Kushner to ask the incoming administration to consider giving a ‘major appointment’’ to Manafort’s banker,” Bloomberg reports.
Replied Kushner: “On it!”
“That email exchange, which was admitted as evidence during Manafort’s tax-fraud trial last year, gained new significance Thursday with the unsealing of a federal indictment in New York. The new filing accused the banker, Stephen Calk, of extending loans to Manafort as part of an effort to bribe his way into a plum administration job.”
Playbook: “In the last two weeks, Jared Kushner has launched two initiatives: his big-time immigration plan, and an economic plan for the Middle East, aimed at empowering the Palestinians.”
“What’s the common thread here? In both cases, a debate about the merits was drowned out by an apparent lack of preparation — and coalition-building — by Jared’s crew in the White House.”
“On immigration, House Republicans and Democrats were caught flat-footed by the plan, and Jared’s team — deeply distrustful of everyone in the White House — didn’t have paper immediately to explain what they were trying to do.”
“As for Mideast peace, one of the immediate storylines that emerged was that the Palestinians said they were not consulted about the Palestinian economic empowerment summit that’s a month away in Bahrain. That led Middle East reporters and longtime Israel watchers to immediately doubt Jared’s plan.”
“Jared Kushner struggled to answer questions about his plan to overhaul the immigration system in a closed-door meeting with Republican senators Tuesday, winning little support for the proposal,” the Washington Post reports.
“Publicly, senators emerged from their weekly Capitol Hill luncheon, applauding the White House senior adviser’s pitch to move U.S. immigration toward a merit-based system that prioritizes highly skilled workers, a task he undertook at Trump’s behest.”
“But privately, Republican officials said Kushner had difficulty answering questions from a friendly audience, prompting Trump’s other senior adviser, Stephen Miller, to interrupt and take over the conversation.”
Jared Kushner is “preparing to sell ambitious fixes to two of the most stubborn problems of the past 50 years,” Politico reports.
“With a headlong plunge into immigration reform and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Kushner is presenting his political inexperience as an asset, telling lawmakers he is free of preconceived notions that stymied previous attempts. His air of breezy self-assurance in the private meetings he is conducting to tease his plans at times astounds the battle-scarred veterans of past such efforts. Critics complain, too, that his briefings are often woefully short on detail.”
Jared Kushner said that the Mueller probe was “more harmful” to the United States than Russian election interference Mueller was charged with investigating, Politico reports.
Said Kushner: “You look at what Russia did, buying some Facebook ads and trying to sow dissent. It’s a terrible thing. But I think the investigations and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple Facebook ads.”
“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!”
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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