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Post by Admin on Jan 11, 2017 18:56:49 GMT
Fifteen years before Jared Kushner helped defeat Hillary Clinton in the U.S. presidential race, their families did business together. It was October 17, 2001, and Bill Clinton had only been out of the White House for nine months. Already on a worldwide speaking tour, the former president stopped at the Kushner Companies in Florham Park, N.J. to deliver a speech — and collect $125,000.
Jared Kushner, who has run his family’s real estate firm for roughly a decade, is now married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka. Donald Trump named him senior advisor on Monday, in a press release that did not mention their familial relation. Kushner was a key player in Trump’s campaign, but many observers doubted he would take a formal role in the White House, citing nepotism laws that ban the president from giving government roles to relatives
Back in 2001, the Kushners, Clintons and Trumps could not have predicted how history would unfold. At the time, Hillary Clinton was only just beginning her independent political career as a U.S. senator. Donald Trump was overseeing his business empire. Ivanka Trump started dating Jared Kushner six years after Bill Clinton delivered the speech. And Jared’s father Charles, a Democratic heavyweight, was still leading the Kushner Companies.
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Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2019 17:25:20 GMT
Ivanka and Jared are both senior advisers to President Trump, for women’s issues and strategic planning respectively. Their appointments led to accusations of nepotism, and Ivanka being dubbed the First Daughter, a title she reportedly likes. However, this power couple has not always been so strong – they split for several months in 2008 after a year of dating. The break-up was partly due to Jared’s parents, Charlie and Seryl Kushner, apparently being “horrified” by the match. According to 2019 book ‘Kushner Inc’, they were concerned that Ivanka was not Jewish and were aghast that Jared was considering marrying outside the faith. Author Vicky Ward wrote: “The idea was particularly offensive to Seryl, who had raised the children. “They were her world, and her world was the closed conservative Jewish culture she had grown up in. “Charlie and Seryl refused to even meet Ivanka, although Hammer repeatedly talked to Charlie about it.” Alan Hammer, lawyer and friend of Charlie, reportedly told him: “You’re the closest people to your children of anybody that I know. “So what are you going to do Charlie? Are you going to go sit shiva for your favourite child?” Shiva is a period of seven days of formal mourning for the dead, observed by Jews.
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Post by Admin on Nov 4, 2019 21:20:11 GMT
A White House official dismissed as 'false nonsense' Monday a claim that Jared Kushner gave permission to Saudi ruler Mohammad bin Salman to arrest Jamal Khashoggi before he was killed and dismembered. The claim was made in a report in Cockburn gossip column of the U.S. edition of British conservative news magazine The Spectator. The report also claimed that Turkish intelligence intercepted the call and President Recep Erdogan then used the information to force Donald Trump to remove his troops from northern Syria. The report claims that investigators on the Democratic-led House Intelligence Committee are aware of these allegations and are planning to dig further into them while pursuing the impeachment inquiry over Trump's dealings with Ukraine. It also claims that the number of intelligence 'whistleblowers' who have given or are willing to give evidence to the House Intelligence Committee's impeachment inquiry is seven, one of whom has made the claim about Kushner. However it counts two of those 'whistleblowers' as Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, the National Security Council's top Ukraine expert, and Tim Morrison, the NSC's director for European and Russian Affairs, both of whom gave evidence under subpoena to the impeachment probe and who both listened to Trump's call to Ukraine's president Volodymyr Zelenskiy. In October 2018, Khashoggi visited the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to sort documents before he was to be married to his Turkish fiancee, Hatice Cengiz. He never emerged.
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Post by Admin on Mar 9, 2020 18:22:43 GMT
Executive produced by prolific documentarian Alex Gibney, Netflix’s docuseries returns for its second season on March 11, delivering six new hour-long stories about the wretched lengths people will go to accumulate wealth—as well as the clout and influence that comes along with it. Destined to incite outrage and dismay, it’s another round of eye-opening warnings about the foolishness of expecting fairness and decency in any situation in which the powerful have an opportunity to profit at the expense of the less fortunate. And chief among this season’s villains is a fresh-faced young entrepreneur who proves the age-old maxim, like father (and father-in-law), like son: Jared Kushner, aptly described here as “a tier-one predator.” Directed by Daniel DiMauro and Morgan Pehme (Get Me Roger Stone), Dirty Money’s third installment “Slumlord Millionaire” takes direct aim at Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who married the president’s daughter Ivanka after assuming control of his father Charles’ real estate empire. That position was attained at an early age because Charles had to spend two years in prison for trying to obstruct a Chris Christie investigation into his business by—I kid you not—blackmailing his sister and brother-in-law with video of the latter having sex with a prostitute that Charles had hired. As DiMauro and Pehme lay out in startling fashion, the rotten apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Along with purchasing the New York Observer in order to control negative press about him and his relatives (a reaction to the tabloid beating his dad took), Kushner quickly began managing the family business via underhanded practices of a despicable sort.
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Post by Admin on Apr 2, 2020 18:01:48 GMT
Dozens of Trump administration officials have trooped to the White House podium over the last two months to brief the public on their effort to combat coronavirus, but one person who hasn't -- Jared Kushner -- has emerged as perhaps the most pivotal figure in the national fight against the fast-growing pandemic. What started two-and-a-half weeks ago as an effort to utilize the private sector to fix early testing failures has become an all-encompassing portfolio for Kushner, who, alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government: Expanding test access, ramping up industry production of needed medical supplies, and figuring out how to get those supplies to key locations. Kushner has even obtained a new center of power at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the crisis-response organization that's taken over coronavirus strategy and planning -- and where Kushner and his deputies ride herd on the health agencies that had been criticized for their slow responses to the pandemic earlier this year. Kushner’s group, which some have characterized as an “all-of-private-sector” operation in contrast to Vice President Mike Pence’s “all-of-government” task force, has had its successes – including airlifting emergency medical supplies to the United States, crowdsourcing mask and glove donations, and rapidly devising a last-ditch plan for hospitals to maximize ventilators. But the behind-the-scenes working group has also duplicated existing federal teams and operations, and its focus on rapid, short-term decisions has created concern among some health-agency officials, according to interviews with 11 people involved in Kushner’s effort, including senior government officials, outside advisers and volunteers on the projects, as well as other health department and White House officials. Federal decision-making is complicated by the fact that Kushner has the full confidence of President Donald Trump, with whom he confers multiple times a day, while Trump has expressed frustration with some of the leaders of health agencies. “You can’t have enough good smart people working on a problem of this scale,” said Andy Slavitt, who helped lead the Obama administration’s 2013-2014 HealthCare.gov repair effort and is now advising on Kushner's coronavirus response. “But they have to be organized with a clear chain of command.” The crisis response team built by the president’s son-in-law is distinct from the White House task force led by Pence, and has adopted an all-out, ad-hoc attitude toward beating back the coronavirus pandemic, heedless of normal government boundaries and, to some extent, conflicts of interest.
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