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.”

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.”

“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.

“Over the past decade, Jared Kushner’s family company has spent billions of dollars buying real estate. His personal stock investments have soared. His net worth has quintupled to almost $324 million,” the New York Times reports.

“And yet, for several years running, Mr. Kushner — President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior White House adviser — appears to have paid almost no federal income taxes.”

“His low tax bills are the result of a common tax-minimizing maneuver that, year after year, generated millions of dollars in losses for Mr. Kushner, according to the documents. But the losses were only on paper — Mr. Kushner and his company did not appear to actually lose any money. The losses were driven by depreciation, a tax benefit that lets real estate investors deduct a portion of the cost of their buildings from their taxable income every year.”

“Jared Kushner personally ordered a software developer at his newspaper to remove stories that were critical of his friends and real estate peers,” BuzzFeed News reports.

“Now a senior White House adviser and son-in-law to President Trump, Kushner in 2012 went around the editorial leaders at the New York Observer — the newspaper he owned and operated — to mandate the removal of a handful of articles from the website.”

Washington Post: “Jared Kushner, a senior White House adviser and President Trump’s son-in-law, lacks the security clearance level required to review some of the government’s most sensitive secrets, according to two people familiar with his access. For the first year of the Trump administration, Kushner had nearly blanket access to highly classified intelligence, even as he held an interim security clearance and awaited the completion of his background investigation.”

“But when White House security officials granted him a permanent clearance in late May, he was granted only ‘top secret’ status — a level that does not allow him to see some of the country’s most closely guarded intelligence.”

Jared Kushner “has been granted his permanent security clearance… ending a period of uncertainty that had fueled questions about whether Mr. Kushner was in peril in the special counsel investigation,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Kushner’s F.B.I. background checks had dragged on for a year. White House officials were adamant that the lengthy process was not unusual for a government official who has a complicated financial history and many foreign contacts. But the delay became a distraction and, with the special counsel investigating some of Mr. Kushner’s meetings with Russian officials, it left open the question of whether investigators had uncovered evidence that made him a security threat.”

“Graduates of the Harvard class of 2003 are making known their displeasure with the current White House administration in an unusual way, using the platform of their 15th reunion alumni notes to launch harsh, personal attacks on a former classmate,” the Boston Globe reports.

“The salvos against Jared Kushner are tucked in among the usual fare of alumni notes, where former classmates proudly recite their latest accomplishments, volunteer work, a move across the country, or the birth of a child.”

Said one former classmate: “I, for one, am actually glad that our Class of ’03 finally has a real, live fascist among us. Who says Harvard isn’t diverse?”

“The company controlled by the family of the White House adviser Jared Kushner is close to receiving a bailout of its financially troubled flagship building by a company with ties to the government of Qatar,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Kushner earlier this year lost his top-secret security clearance amid concerns that foreign governments could attempt to gain influence with the White House by doing business with the Kushner Companies.”