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Jared and Ivanka…

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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« on: July 15, 2017, 11:30:47 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Ivanka and Jared begin the plunge from grace

President Trump's daughter and her husband are not faring well in the political limelight.

By EUGENE ROBINSON | 7:37PM EDT - Thursday, July 13, 2017

Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner. — Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images.
Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner. — Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images.

JARED KUSHNER and IVANKA TRUMP have tried their best to soar gracefully above the raging dumpster fire that is the Trump administration. Unhappily for the handsome couple, gravity makes no allowances for charm.

Kushner, already reported to be a “person of interest” in the Justice Department probe of President Trump's campaign, is arguably the individual with the most to lose from the revelation that the campaign did, after all, at least attempt to collude with the Russian government to boost Trump's chances of winning the election.

The president's hapless eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. — who convened the June 2016 meeting with a Russian lawyer for the purpose of obtaining dirt on Hillary Clinton — had no operational role in the campaign. Paul J. Manafort, who also attended, was the campaign's chairman, but his many shady business dealings with several Ukrainian and Russian characters were already under scrutiny, so the encounter with attorney Natalia Veselnitskaya could be seen as just another item on the list.

Kushner was at the meeting, too, however, and he had oversight of the campaign's digital operations. That could be a problem, given the U.S. intelligence community's conclusion that Russia interfered with the election and that the meddling took place largely in cyberspace.

And unlike the other participants, Kushner has an official position in the Trump administration. He serves in the White House as a senior adviser to the president with responsibility for numerous high-profile initiatives — and with a top-secret security clearance, which should be revoked immediately.

Trump Jr. says that Kushner didn't stay long at the session with Veselnitskaya and that no damaging information about Clinton was imparted. But because he kept the meeting secret for more than a year, scoffing indignantly at the very notion of collusion with the Russians, and then twice lied about the nature of the meeting before finally coming clean, no one should believe another word that Trump Jr. says on the subject. At least, not until special counsel Robert S. Mueller III puts him under oath, which I believe is likely to happen.

At one point in his changing story, Trump Jr. said that Kushner and Manafort didn't even know what the meeting was about. Yet he copied both of them on an email chain that begins with an intermediary's offer of campaign help from the “Russian government”. The proper thing to do would have been to call the FBI, but this crowd knows nothing of propriety.

The Veselnitskaya encounter was one of more than 100 meetings or phone calls with foreigners that somehow slipped Kushner's mind when he applied for his security clearance. He revealed this one in one of his subsequent efforts to amend the form.

It is hard to imagine what connection Kushner might have had to the Russian hacking of Democratic National Committee computers and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta's emails. But there was another component of the clandestine effort to help Trump get elected: Investigators believe that as Election Day approached, Russian trolls and “bots” flooded the social media accounts of key voters in swing states with “fake news” and disinformation about Clinton, according to a report on Wednesday by McClatchy.

How would the Russians know which voters to target, down to the precinct level, in states such as Wisconsin and Michigan? This is a question that surely will be posed to Kushner, since at the time he happened to be overseeing a sophisticated digital campaign operation that tracked voters at a granular level.

Ivanka Trump's name has not surfaced in the Russia affair. But she, like her husband, is serving as a presidential adviser, and she received unwanted attention when she briefly took her father's place at the head table during the Group of 20 summit in Hamburg. We expect officials representing our country to have been elected by the voters or appointed because of merit, not installed by the caprices of heredity.

She also received unwanted scrutiny when three labor activists were arrested in May for investigating alleged sweatshop practices at a factory in China where Ivanka Trump-brand shoes have been manufactured.

Among Manhattan's progressive upper crust, Jared and Ivanka — they really are first-name-only celebrities at this point — were expected to at least temper the hard-right policy positions being pushed by other presidential advisers. If this indeed is what they are trying to do, they've had a negligible impact to date.

Writing in TIME magazine, Henry Kissinger wished Kushner well “in his daunting role flying close to the sun”. Jared and Ivanka have first-class educations. They know how the Icarus story ends.


• Eugene Robinson writes a twice-a-week column on politics and culture for The Washington Post, contributes to the PostPartisan blog, and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In a three-decade career at The Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper's Style section.

__________________________________________________________________________

More on this topic:

 • VIDEO: Untangling the web of Jared Kushner

 • VIDEO: Donald Trump Jr.'s emails aren't a smoking gun. They're a blazing gun. Here's why.

 • Greg Sargent: How Trump may have helped Donald Jr. lie about his Russia meeting

 • Randall Eliason: Trump Jr.'s emails are more damning than anyone could have imagined


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/ivanka-and-jared-begin-the-plunge-from-grace/2017/07/13/0c8d7072-6805-11e7-9928-22d00a47778f_story.html
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Donald
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« Reply #1 on: July 16, 2017, 12:52:01 am »

Yes, lovely couple, which one will be the next president🙄
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #2 on: July 16, 2017, 01:40:23 am »


More like....which one will end up in jail with Donald Jr.
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« Reply #3 on: July 16, 2017, 02:16:27 am »

Oh....has a law been broken...is someone in court...please tell😳
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #4 on: July 16, 2017, 04:39:19 pm »


Yes, we know you stupid righties have no morals whatsoever.

All you worry about is the law until such time as you get busted, then you suddenly start crying, “mummy, mummy, those mean lefties are picking on me!”

Which is exactly why whenever the people rise up and a revolution occurs, it's good that you righties generally end up getting lined up along a wall and shot dead after first being tortured.
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #5 on: July 16, 2017, 04:41:40 pm »


from The Washington Post....

The real lesson of the Trump family's troubles?
Nepotism doesn't pay.


In business or politics, putting relatives in charge is a bad idea.

By ELIZABETH SPIERS | 9:45PM EDT - Friday, July 14, 2017

President Trump has relied on Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for business and politics. It's not working out so well. — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.
President Trump has relied on Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for business and politics. It's not working out so well.
 — Photograph: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post.


IN MY early 20s, I worked for a hedge fund manager as an analyst, performing due diligence on companies he was considering for investment. I visited a wide range of businesses — storage area network companies, broadband providers, medical-device manufacturers and less tech-oriented ventures, including one whose only products were couches and chairs that converted into beds. Sometimes the companies were interesting and innovative, and sometimes they were complete disasters. The disasters had many of the same markers: poor performance, murky financials and, at least once, a supercar of Italian extraction leased by management in the parking lot.

One other trend stood out: If my boss told me that I'd be looking at a “family run” company, there would probably be additional red flags. These didn't always emerge, but when they did, they were consistent. Senior managers would be woefully unqualified or incompetent or both, and inevitably related to the chief executive. Certain employees, also related to the CEO, would be regarded as un-fireable. Their excessive compensation (it was always excessive) would in no way be tied to performance. Succession plans would consist of elevating and installing relatives in unearned positions designed primarily to satisfy the founder's fantasies of creating a dynasty.

I encountered those same dynamics years later when, as editor in chief of the New York Observer, I assigned and edited stories about commercial real estate in the city. New York real estate is very dynastic and insular; a few families have run the largest companies over the course of several generations. One of them is the family of Jared Kushner, then the Observer's owner and now a senior White House adviser and son-in-law to President Trump. Another, of course, is Trump's. Both Kushner and Trump are second-generation executives in their family businesses (I would use the word “were” here, but neither of them have completely divested themselves), and Trump's children are third-generation.

So when the Trump family business became running the United States of America, naturally, the head of the household could not resist installing his nearest and dearest in positions of senior management. Kushner and Ivanka Trump were given adviser positions and West Wing offices; Donald Trump Jr. and his brother Eric were left to nominally run the Trump Organization. And if I were conducting due diligence on either operation today — the United States or Trump's business — I wouldn't recommend getting involved. The controversy this past week prompted by Trump Jr.'s disclosure that he met with a Russian lawyer to obtain dirt on Hillary Clinton as part of the Russian government's support for Trump may have overshadowed the controversy the previous week prompted by Trump's decision to let Ivanka represent the United States at a Group of 20 meeting. But they're symptoms of the same underlying dysfunction: The unearned power Trump's children wield simply because they're his children.

When Kushner and Ivanka Trump first arrived in the White House, their presence was greeted with a tiny bit of hope on the part of liberals and anti-Trump Republicans that the two might be able to moderate the president's worst impulses. They were going to persuade him to prioritize climate change, advance progressive workplace rules for women and families, and defend gay rights. But so far there's no concrete evidence that they've gotten anything done except to accompany Trump in meetings when convenient, exploit the office for access to people they wouldn't meet otherwise and pose for photo ops.

Trump has made it no secret that he views Ivanka as a potential successor of sorts — he once suggested he could name her as his running mate. So although it was wildly inappropriate, it's not the least bit surprising that both of them thought it was fine for her to sit in for Dad at the G-20 summit. The conclave was not, of course, a Take Your Daughter to Work event. But for someone who recently claimed to “stay out of politics”, Ivanka didn't seem to have any objection to being slotted into a position with very big political stakes. In her mind, apparently, it was hers to take. Similarly, her husband seems to feel qualified, despite a lack of anything resembling relevant experience or expertise, to assume the mantle of director in charge of everything the president doesn't understand or wants to delegate or that Kushner would simply like to run.

Kushner's appointment(s) are already backfiring, though, in part because last year, he took part in meetings with a number of Russian operatives and neglected to mention them on crucial security forms — including Trump Jr.'s meeting.

That meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya was a product of Trump Jr.'s own license to take charge of anything his family's name touches. Like all his siblings and his brother-in-law, Trump Jr. had no experience working in politics before last year, but that didn't stop him from meeting with sketchy operatives and dragging the ostensible professionals, such as campaign manager Paul Manafort, into them.

This past week, after news of the meeting burst into the open, the president first offered a head-scratching defense of his son, applauding Jr.'s transparency (something Trump has never valued in any incarnation) and tepidly referring to him as “a high-quality person”, a designation ambiguously located on the president's usual scale of “loser” to “tremendous”, and not exactly the term of endearment you'd expect from a protective parent. Trump also pleaded ignorance of the meeting in question, which strains credulity even more than it probably strains the family bonds. Asked about it at a news conference in Paris on Thursday, he stuck with the general line that his namesake hadn't done anything wrong: “I have a son who's a great young man. He's a fine person. He took a meeting with a lawyer from Russia. It lasted for a very short period, and nothing came of the meeting. And I think it's a meeting that most people in politics probably would have taken.”

The one upside that may have appealed to the CEOs of all those family-owned corporations — and, apparently, the head of our newly family-owned federal government — is that putting otherwise unqualified relatives into positions of power does buy a certain amount of blind loyalty. Maybe Trump's motivation for having Kushner and Ivanka in the White House with him was not that he ever intended to rely on them as advisers (there's no evidence that they've ever been able to sway him on policy), but rather that they provide some psychological comfort, in the sense that he can trust them not to stab him in the back.

The dysfunction of Trump's nepotistic impulses goes hand in hand with his family's odd notion of loyalty. It's a sentiment that runs only one way: Everyone in the family demands loyalty, but none of them necessarily expects to reciprocate it, especially to anyone outside the family. (I include Kushner here, who once told me that a predecessor of mine was someone he admired because he was a “loyal guy”, neglecting to mention that the “loyal guy” was someone he had fired.) This view is evidently shared by Trump Jr., who in 2012 tweeted the following: “At dinner w our greenskeeper who missed his sister's wedding 2 work (luv loyalty 2 us) ‘No big deal hopefully she'll have another someday’Wink

Ultimately, the mess Trump and his administration have landed in was an obvious consequence of this most disastrous of family-run enterprises. People related to the president were put in senior positions, once again, despite having no being woefully unqualified or incompetent or both. They were, and are, regarded as un-fireable and not held to normal performance standards. And much of this is driven by the family patriarch's fantasies of political dynasty.

All of the red flags are there; not even family wins out. And certainly not the country. The only real loyalty Trump has ever had is to himself.


• Elizabeth Spiers was the founding editor of Gawker and is the former editor in chief of the New York Observer.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • I worked for Jared Kushner. He's the wrong businessman to reinvent government.

 • Ivanka Trump's West Wing job isn't just unethical. It's also dangerous.

 • Jared Kushner's White House job may be legal. But history shows it's a bad idea.

 • How President Trump could use the White House to enrich himself and his family

 • Donald Trump is America's Silvio Berlusconi


https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/the-real-lesson-of-the-trump-familys-troubles-nepotism-doesnt-pay/2017/07/14/cce20cbe-6839-11e7-8eb5-cbccc2e7bfbf_story.html
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Donald
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« Reply #6 on: July 17, 2017, 01:40:29 am »

Ktj......"In business or politics, putting relatives in charge is a bad idea."

....I agree....just look at  the Clintons stuff up😉
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Kiwithrottlejockey
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« Reply #7 on: July 18, 2017, 07:05:11 pm »


from The Washington Post....

Why Jared Kushner has had to update his disclosure
of foreign contacts more than once


Those close to the president's son-in-law say the omissions on his national security
questionnaire were simple errors, but the document warns that those who submit false
information could be charged with a federal crime and face up to five years in prison.


By MATT ZAPOTOSKY | 6:36PM EDT - Monday, July 17, 2017

Jared Kushner, with wife Ivanka Trump, sits in the White House's East Room in June. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.
Jared Kushner, with wife Ivanka Trump, sits in the White House's East Room in June. — Photograph: Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press.

SPECIAL COUNSEL Robert S. Mueller III is likely to be interested in Jared Kushner's evolving disclosure of foreign contacts during the security clearance process, legal analysts said, and it is possible that the president's son-in-law could be in legal jeopardy for not fully detailing the interactions from the start.

Kushner, one of President Trump's closest advisers, has filed three updates to his national security questionnaire since submitting it in mid-January, according to people familiar with the matter. That is significant because the document — known as an SF-86 — warns that those who submit false information could be charged with a federal crime and face up to five years in prison.

Prosecutions for filing erroneous SF-86 forms are rare — though the Justice Department has brought cases against those with intentional omissions, and people have been denied security clearance for incorrect forms, legal analysts said.

Under the microscope of Mueller's investigation, the analysts said, Kushner's mistakes might be viewed as evidence that Kushner met with Russian officials, then tried to keep anyone from finding out. His representatives contend that the omissions were honest errors that were corrected quickly.

“Mueller's task is examining whether he thinks there's evidence that this was not simply a mistake or an oversight, but was actually a deliberate attempt to conceal these contacts,” said Randall Eliason, a former federal prosecutor who specializes in public corruption and government fraud. “And if that's the case, that's definitely potentially a crime.”

The SF-86 is a 127-page form that requests voluminous information about a person's employment history, finances, family, travel and other matters. The form asks several questions about foreign contacts, requiring applicants to list any “close and/or continuing contact with a foreign national within the last seven years,” along with any contact with a representative of a foreign government.

The form is a part of a person's background check for certain federal jobs and is meant to ascertain whether the person can be awarded a security clearance.

Legal analysts said it is not uncommon for people to forget information; nor is it uncommon for officials to encounter difficulty in the security clearance process.

Kushner's national security questionnaire was first submitted on January 18th, though a person familiar with his account said that his office did so prematurely, and the form did not list his foreign contacts and got the dates of his graduate degrees and his father-in-law's address wrong.

The next day, Kushner's representatives submitted an addendum acknowledging that he had foreign contacts and saying that he would willingly detail them, the person said.

At the time, Kushner's representatives had not compiled a list of the contacts, but they did so and submitted another addendum with them in mid-May, before an interview with FBI background investigators, the person said. The addendum detailed more than 100 calls or meetings with representatives of more than 20 countries, most of which came during the presidential transition, according to Jamie Gorelick, one of Kushner's attorneys.

“Jared was trying to be fully compliant and upfront and transparent in this process, and when he learned that the document had been prematurely submitted, he was very clear that we should correct the record on that,” Gorelick said.

On June 21st, Kushner submitted another addendum; this one listed the meeting he attended — along with Donald Trump Jr. and Paul Manafort, Donald Trump's campaign manager at the time — with a Russian lawyer who Trump Jr. believed had damaging information about Hillary Clinton.

A person close to Kushner said he did not remember the meeting with the lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, when submitting his list of foreign contacts in mid-May. The person said his lawyers discovered correspondence about it while reviewing emails to turn over information to congressional investigators. Gorelick said the meeting was included “out of an abundance of caution.”

As Mr. Kushner has consistently stated, he is eager to cooperate and share what he knows,” Gorelick said.

Mark Zaid, a national security lawyer, said he believes that a disclosure of the meeting would not have been required, because Veselnitskaya is not now a government lawyer and Kushner does not have a close or continuing relationship with her.

“Too many people are imposing requirements on him that don't exist,” Zaid said. The person familiar with Kushner's account said he was interviewed by the FBI after supplementing his disclosure in June. The agents interviewing him were doing so as part of the background check process, the person said. It is unclear if Kushner also was approached by Mueller's office.

Still, Zaid said that Kushner's earlier, flawed SF-86 form was “problematic,” and that if “Jared Kushner were just Jared Simpson who was up for a job at the Defense Department, he would be in much hotter water with respect to an agency adjudicating his clearance based on his Russian contacts.”

The person familiar with his account declined to speak about that topic, and a spokesman for the special counsel's office also declined to comment. The Washington Post has previously reported that the special counsel is interested in Kushner's contacts with Russians in December.

If prosecutors were to try to bring charges against Kushner connected to his filings, they would have to prove that his omissions were intentional. Earlier this year, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent was sentenced to one year of probation in a case in which he and a colleague were convicted of lying about their employment at an adult entertainment club and their relationship with a Brazilian national who danced there. The prosecution was led in part by Andrew D. Goldstein, then an assistant U.S. attorney in the Southern District of New York. He has since joined Mueller's team.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions also indicated on a security clearance form that he had not had any contact with a foreign government official — even though he met with Sergey Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, twice last year. An aide said that he was told by the FBI investigator handling the background check that Sessions need not list meetings with foreign dignitaries in connection with Senate activities.

Edward B. MacMahon Jr., another national security lawyer in private practice, said he “can't imagine there's a risk of prosecution” with Kushner.

“If you're under scrutiny, and you have electronic records that can help you fill these out to put an end to the questions, you might just do that,” MacMahon said. “Somebody will say that means you were hiding something, and somebody will say that means you were being more forthcoming. It depends on whose ox is being gored.”

But Harry Litman, a former U.S. attorney and Justice Department official who was involved in discussions about the SF-86 form many years ago, said Kushner probably fears that there is “real jeopardy” from the special counsel, and that explains his updates to his form.

“As a result of the Mueller investigation, there's broader goals in play,” Litman said, “and certainly his lawyers are advising him, ‘Look, the game has changed here’.”


• Matt Zapotosky covers the Justice Department for The Washington Post's National Security team.

__________________________________________________________________________

Related to this topic:

 • The Fix: 6 defenses of Donald Trump Jr.'s Russia meeting — each less credible than the last

 • Russian American lobbyist was present at Trump Jr.'s meeting with Kremlin-connected lawyer

 • Sessions didn't disclose meetings with Russian officials on security clearance form


https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/why-jared-kushner-has-had-to-update-his-disclosure-of-foreign-contacts-more-than-once/2017/07/17/b04e8158-6b05-11e7-96ab-5f38140b38cc_story.html
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