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Post by Admin on Jan 21, 2021 5:50:19 GMT
Ivanka Trump fought back tears as she witnessed her father’s final moments as president on the runway of Joint Base Andrews. President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania walked down a red carpet onto Air Force One for the last time as “YMCA” played. Hours earlier, around 1 a.m., the White House released a blizzard of 143 pardons and commutations that included Lil Wayne and indicted former Trump strategist Steve Bannon. He did not attempt to pardon himself or any family members. President Trump's children were overcome with emotion as their father departed Washington, D.C. on Air Force One for the last time. Ivanka Trump, 39, scrunched her face up in sobs as she watched her dad in the final hours of his presidency arriving at Joint Base Andrews and boarding a plane south to Palm Beach, Florida. Accompanied by her husband and her children, the First Daughter also stood alongside her siblings Eric, Don. Jr., and Tiffany — the latter of whom were trying their best to hold it together during the emotional sendoff.and her siblings as they watched their time in D.C. come to an end and their father fly off.
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Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2021 6:16:55 GMT
Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump were planning a vacation. They’d spent the last four years in the West Wing, and a year before that on the campaign trail. It’s not that they didn’t go on vacation while they served as senior advisers to her father, former president Donald Trump. They did—early on, to Aspen after the failed attempt to overturn Obamacare and then to the posh Twin Farms in Vermont following the Charlottesville riots. They vacationed on horseback in Wyoming and on the beach in Florida. This holiday would be different, though. They wouldn’t be coming back to Washington, at least not in any official capacity. Her father had lost, despite his efforts to overturn a free and fair election. He had whipped up his supporters and, through tweets and rallies to which Ivanka accompanied him, incited them to stage an insurrection. State attorneys general discussed postpresidency investigations into the family’s business and campaign practices. The House of Representatives voted to impeach him, for a second time.
So, Jared and Ivanka were looking for a breather. One of the places they toyed with going was the Yellowstone Club, the private residential ski club in Big Sky, Montana, that reportedly counts Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Justin Timberlake as members and charges them many hundreds of thousands of dollars in initiation fees and membership dues to enjoy the 2,200 acres of powder. Jared’s brother, Joshua Kushner, has a home there. So does their friend Ron Burkle, the billionaire investor who co-owns the Pittsburgh Penguins and Soho House, as well as several significant properties, from Michael Jackson’s infamous Neverland Ranch to a John Lautner home in Palm Springs. According to four people familiar with the situation, Burkle offered up his Montana property to the couple. But the Yellowstone Club’s COVID safety protocols, which limit the number of guests who are allowed to come stay, waylaid Javanka’s potential trip, according to these people, though some suggested that the club was also eager to avoid the headache of having the lightning rod of a couple there. Burkle, three of the people said, offered them his other properties for their vacation, but the couple ultimately declined. (Burkle, a longtime Democrat who went to the Trump White House in 2017 to shake hands with Trump after the Penguins won the Stanley Cup, is not a fair-weather friend, one person close to him said. He does not feel pressured to duck Jared and Ivanka or shy away from them as others will.)
It looks as though the Trump-Kushners have settled for some downtime in Florida, where they rented a sweeping, unfurnished apartment in a new luxury oceanfront building in Miami’s Surfside neighborhood for at least the next year while they build a house on a $32 million lot that they bought last year on Indian Creek Island. They’re eagerly eyeing the time off, a close associate of the couple told me on Wednesday, as millions of people celebrate Trump’s departure and many, too, are just as ready for a break from them. “They’re looking forward to having a clean break. They haven’t yet gone into what comes next and their government work is done. It is a moment in their lives to focus exclusively on family and just relax.”
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Post by Admin on Jan 22, 2022 2:58:58 GMT
Among the records that Donald Trump’s lawyers tried to shield from Jan. 6 investigators are a draft executive order that would have directed the defense secretary to seize voting machines and a document titled “Remarks on National Healing.” POLITICO has reviewed both documents. The text of the draft executive order is published here for the first time. The executive order — which also would have appointed a special counsel to probe the 2020 election — was never issued. The remarks are a draft of a speech Trump gave the next day. Together, the two documents point to the wildly divergent perspectives of White House advisers and allies during Trump’s frenetic final weeks in office. It’s not clear who wrote either document. But the draft executive order is dated Dec. 16, 2020, and is consistent with proposals that lawyer Sidney Powell made to the then-president. On Dec. 18, 2020, Powell, former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, former Trump administration lawyer Emily Newman, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne met with Trump in the Oval Office. In that meeting, Powell urged Trump to seize voting machines and to appoint her as a special counsel to investigate the election, according to Axios. A spokesperson for the House’s Jan. 6 select committee confirmed earlier Friday that the panel had received the last of the documents that Trump’s lawyers tried to keep under wraps and later declined to comment for this story on these two documents. The draft executive orderThe draft executive order shows that the weeks between Election Day and the Capitol attack could have been even more chaotic than they were. It credulously cites conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan, as well as debunked notions about Dominion voting machines. The order empowers the defense secretary to “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under” a U.S. law that relates to preservation of election records. It also cites a lawsuit filed in 2017 against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Additionally, the draft order would have given the defense secretary 60 days to write an assessment of the 2020 election. That suggests it could have been a gambit to keep Trump in power until at least mid-February of 2021.
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