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.
“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.”
“I can’t say enough good things about Jared and Ivanka. Jared is such a hidden genius that no one understands.”
— Departing U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, quoted by The Hill.
“Controversial right-wing firebrand Ann Coulter thinks she knows who was behind the anonymous op-ed from a purported senior White House official that landed in The New York Times last week: Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s trusted son-in-law,” USA Today reports.
Said Coulter: “Because he and Ivanka are going to have to go back to the Upper East Side and go to the Hamptons. They’re probably worried that Trump will be removed within the next few years.”
Gabriel Sherman: “With Trump so far unable to execute a strategy to stanch the drip-drip-drip of damaging disclosures, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have taken the lead in getting control of the crisis. (The Washington Post reported that Trump said the only people he could trust were his family.) Earlier this week, they told Trump they were deeply troubled by the accounts in Woodward’s book and blamed Chief of Staff John Kelly for many of the leaks, an outside adviser close to them told me.”
Said Ivanka to her father: “He’s destroying your presidency.”
“According to three sources, Jared and Ivanka floated a theory on Wednesday that Kelly could be behind the Times op-ed. Under this scenario, the sources said, the op-ed was written by Zachary Fuentes, the deputy chief of staff, at the direction of Kelly. Jared and Ivanka have told people they suspect this because Kelly is the only one with an ego so large as to have convinced himself that he’s saving the country from Trump, which was one of the op-ed’s principal arguments. On Wednesday night, Ivanka and Jared laid out for Trump the theory that Fuentes might be the author.”
“Paul Manafort turned to Jared Kushner for help in an attempt to secure a Trump administration job for a Chicago banker at the center of Manafort’s fraud trial,” Bloomberg reports.
“Manafort… got a quick response.”
“‘On it!’’ Kushner replied on Nov. 30, 2016, according to an email submitted by prosecutors into evidence Monday at Manafort’s trial on bank and tax-fraud charges.”
“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.”
“The Kushner family–owned New York Observer has cut ties with a writer who has, since 2014, authored dozens of pro-Kremlin articles for the website, the most recent a story in April offering Russia’s spin that the British staged Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons,” BuzzFeed News reports.
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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