Tag: Jared Kushner

The $3,000-a-month toilet for the Ivanka Trump/Jared Kushner Secret Service detail

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Many U.S. Secret Service agents have stood guard in Washington’s elite Kalorama neighborhood, home over the years to Cabinet secretaries and former presidents. Those agents have had to worry about death threats, secure perimeters and suspicious strangers. But with the arrival of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, they had a new worry: finding a toilet.

Instructed not to use any of the half-dozen bathrooms inside the couple’s house, the Secret Service detail assigned to President Trump’s daughter and son-in-law spent months searching for a reliable restroom to use on the job, according to neighbors and law enforcement officials. After resorting to a porta-potty, as well as bathrooms at the nearby home of former president Barack Obama and the not-so-nearby residence of Vice President Pence, the agents finally found a toilet to call their own.

But it came at a cost to U.S. taxpayers. Since September 2017, the federal government has been spending $3,000 a month — more than $100,000 to date — to rent a basement studio, with a bathroom, from a neighbor of the Kushner family. Continue reading.

Former Trump official: President will face legal jeopardy for campaign cash that went to his businesses

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On MSNBC Saturday, former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci predicted that President Donald Trump will face legal and political consequences for the newly reported scheme in which he and his son-in-law Jared Kushner allegedly skimmed money from the campaign through a shell company to enrich the family businesses.

“Of course he knows he’s lost,” said Scaramucci, who famously served in the Trump administration only ten days before being fired. “He’s already planning possibly a television show, a network. Lots of things to do when he leaves. And he’s bundled a tremendous amount of money, over $250 million bundled. He’s going to have to answer for the shell companies inside the campaign, and the disappearance of some of that money.”

“I don’t see him as a political force going forward,” continued Scaramucci. “I think he’ll have too many things to do. There’ll be legal consequences to some of his actions. There’s ongoing investigations in New York. And I think he’s going to be distracted, as his political power wanes, distracted. Remember, whether Secretary Pompeo or others, ten or so younger men and women that look in the mirror every morning and see a future president in his party. They’re going to come after him very hard once he leaves power.” Continue reading.

Oops: Jared Kushner Reportedly Created a Shell Company to Secretly Pay Trump Family Members and Spend Half the Campaign’s Cash

And first daughter-in-law Lara Trump was the president.

Donald Trump and his family have spent the last four years making the airtight case that they view the presidency as simply a means to enrich themselves and their associates. They probably don’t particularly like that reputation and, yet, it hasn’t stopped them from funneling taxpayer money to their private business, gouging the Secret Service, and raising legal defense funds that the fine print says could go directly to their pockets. Oh, and, according to a new report, setting up a shell company that spent hundreds of millions of campaign dollars to pay Trump family members along with other expenditures it seemingly wanted to keep under wraps.

According to Business Insider, first son-in-law Jared Kushnerpersonally approved the creation of the company, incorporated as American Made Media Consultants Corp. and American Made Media Consultants LLC, in April 2018. From there, Eric Trump’s wife, Lara Trump, was named president, with Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence serving as vice president. If you’re wondering why the shell company, described as Business Insider as acting “almost like a campaign within a campaign” was necessary, well, it’s not entirely clear, but it sure sounds like the express purpose was the ability to shield “financial and operational details from public scrutiny,” as it allowed the campaign to avoid federally mandated disclosures concerning what it was spending considerable amounts of money on. And by considerable we mean nearly half of the $1.26 billion raised for Trump’s reelection. Which seems like a lot!

Within the larger campaign, some leaders told Business Insider they were in the dark regarding the AMMC arrangement, saying that they were generally aware the company was used to purchase TV, radio, and digital advertising but had no idea exactly how much each vendor was keeping for itself. While some advisers have accused former campaign manager Brad Parscale of mismanaging money, the bulk of the cash spent by AMMC—$415 million—occurred after Parscale was fired on July 15. (Parscale has defended his spending as campaign manager.) Continue reading.

Trump, Kushner and White House hit with lawsuit to prevent them from destroying records

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President Donald Trump, his son-in-law White House Senior Advisor Jared Kushner, and the White House were hit with a lawsuit on Tuesday to prevent the Trump administration from destroying documents during the last days of their time in office.

According to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and multiple other groups allege that the president and his administration are already “violating the Presidential Records Act by failing to properly preserve records of official government business,” reports Axios.

The lawsuit is suggesting the White House abrogate an official policy requiring staffers to “preserve screenshots of information sent on non-official messaging platforms as official presidential records.” Continue reading.

Ivanka Trump in ‘extremely frantic damage control mode’ after father’s loss: columnist

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With her father, President Donald Trump, having been voted out of office and the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden less than two months away, Ivanka Trump’s days as White House senior adviser are coming to an end. Journalist Bess Levin discusses Ivanka Trump’s post-White House future in her Vanity Fair column, arguing that the president’s daughter is finding herself in “extremely frantic damage control mode.”

Levin explains, “When Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner first took jobs in the White House in 2017, they presumably assumed that eight years later, they’d return to New York and be crowned the king and queen not just of an exclusive social set but the city — nay, the entire globe. Vogue would put them on the cover of the September issue. Billionaires would beg them to sit on the boards of their companies to lend an air of credibility…. Instead, they’re being unceremoniously booted out of the place after just four years, with significantly worse reputations than when they started.”

President Trump’s one term in office, according to Levin, has done nothing to help either his daughter’s reputation or the reputation of her husband, Kushner, who is also a White House senior adviser. Continue reading.

Management company owned by Jared Kushner files to evict hundreds of families as moratoriums expire

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White House adviser’s company, Westminster Management, and other landlords prepare to remove tenants behind on rent during the pandemic.

Westminster Management, an apartment company owned in part by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, has submitted hundreds of eviction filings in court against tenants with past due rent during the pandemic, according to interviews with more than a dozen tenants and a review of hundreds of the company’s filings.

A state eviction moratorium currently bars Maryland courts from removing tenants from their homes, and a federal moratorium offers renters additional protection. But like other landlords around the country, Westminster has been sending letters to tenants threatening legal fees and then filing eviction notices in court ― a first legal step toward removing tenants. Those notices are now piling up in local courthouses as part of a national backlog of tens of thousands of cases that experts warn could lead to a surge in displaced renters across the country as eviction bans expire and courts resume processing cases.

Many of the Westminster tenants facing eviction live on low or middle incomes in modest apartments in the Baltimore area, according to tenants. Some of them told The Washington Post they fell behind on rent after losing jobs or wages due to the pandemic. Continue reading.

Jared Kushner: ‘Complaining’ Black people have to ‘want to be successful’

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White House adviser Jared Kushner argued on Monday that the Black community is struggling because they do not “want to be successful.”

Kushner made the remarks on Fox & Friends after he was asked about a recent meeting with Ice Cube.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about the issues that were needed in the Black community for the last years, particularly it intensified after the George Floyd situation,” Kushner explained. “You saw a lot of people who were just virtue signaling, they’d go on Instagram and cry or they would put a slogan on their jersey or write something on a basketball court. And quite frankly, that was doing more to polarize the country than it was to bring people forward.” Continue reading.

Kushner and McDaniel bring back Katie Walsh Shields to offer strategic advice

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In recent days, Jared Kushner has brought back 2016 Republican National Committee chief of staff Katie Walsh Shields to offer strategic advice in the RNC’s collaboration with the Trump campaign, according to two senior administration officials and a senior campaign official briefed on the move.

  • A senior administration official said Kushner made the decision in conjunction with RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel.

Why it matters: Walsh played a key role in 2016 in ensuring that the RNC and Trump campaign were efficiently sharing voter targeting data and working in tandem in their get-out-the-vote efforts. 

  • Several campaign advisers have told me that they believe this coordination between the campaign and the RNC has not worked well in recent months, especially following Brad Parscale’s demotion as campaign manager.
  • Walsh declined to comment. Continue reading.

Kushner Biz Won $850 Million In U.S.-Backed Loans At Special Terms: Report

Kushner Companies pay no principal on the Freddie Mac-backed loans for a decade, WNYC and ProPublica reported.

The Kushner family real estate company, partly owned by White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, was granted $850 million in government-backed loans with “unusually good terms,” New York Public Radio and ProPublica reported.

The loans backed by the government-sponsored Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corp. — known as Freddie Mac — granted last year to Kushner Companies made it possible for the business to purchase thousands of apartments in Maryland and Virginia in its largest deal in a decade, according to the joint investigation by WNYC and ProPublica.

Jared Kushner gave up running the company after father-in-law President Donald Trump gave him a job as White House adviser. But he remains a key stakeholder in the company, and has made millions of dollars from the business, including from operations linked to the Freddie Mac-backed deals, according to his financial disclosure filings. Continue reading.

Whistleblower on Jared Kushner’s COVID task force says he was told to ‘fudge’ death data model

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A grandson of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy told The New Yorker that he was the whistleblower that sounded the alarm on presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner’s coronavirus task force to Congress.

“Americans are facing a crisis of tragic proportions, and there is an urgent need for an effective, efficient and bold response. From my few weeks as a volunteer, I believe we are falling short,” he said in the complaint in April. “I am writing to alert my representatives of these challenges and to ask that they do everything possible to help front-line health-care workers and other Americans in need.”

“I just couldn’t sleep,” Kennedy told Mayer. “I was so distressed and disturbed by what I’d seen.” Continue reading.