It's okay to talk about President/King Kushner

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The (Ku)shit(ner) is about to hit the fan.  TAKE COVER! 

Jared Kushner had a rough week and it doesn't look like it's going to get any better
https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/03/16/jared-kushner-rough-week-doesnt-look-like-its-going-get-any-better/23693918/

It's been a rough week for President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Kushner still faces congressional scrutiny after an internal White House memo suggested Trump was directly involved in granting his security clearance.

Kushner's academic records and the circumstances surrounding his acceptance to Harvard University have also been publicly questioned.

Several other excerpts from the upcoming tell-all book on Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, shine an unflattering light on the couple.

In a statement to INSIDER about the book, a spokesperson for Kushner's real-estate firm called the book "fiction," and said "the book is too fake and too dumb to warrant any comment."

It's been a rough week for President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Questions surrounding the circumstances of his security clearance (and whether Trump influenced the process), still loom as lawmakers demand the US Justice Department launch an investigation into the matter.

According to people who were briefed on a contemporaneous memo, Trump had "ordered" former White House chief of staff John Kelly to upgrade Kushner's interim top-secret security clearance. The incident reportedly concerned Kelly and prompted him to put it on the record.

Democratic lawmakers like Rep. Ted Lieu of California and Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia issued a joint statement saying they were "deeply disturbed" by the existence of Kelly's memo, which was first reported by The New York Times last week.

"We request that the Department of Justice open an immediate investigation to determine if Mr. Kushner is criminally liable," the lawmakers said, as they referenced over a hundred foreign contacts that were omitted from Kushner's initial security clearance application.

But Kushner's security clearance request isn't the only official application that's being scrutinized. His academic records and the circumstances surrounding his acceptance to Harvard University are also being scrutinized following the news of the FBI's college admissions fraud case.

Several parents — including actresses, fashion designers, and finance executives — are accused of paying large sums of money and fabricating documents to help their kids get into prestigious colleges and universities.

High school faculty and notable Harvard classmates like Natalie Portman have previously cast doubt on Kushner's academic performance.

In order to help secure his admission to Harvard, Kushner's father allegedly pledged a donation of $2.5 million in 1998, according to joint investigation between ProPublica and the Guardian, fueling theories that Kushner's acceptance to the Ivy League powerhouse was granted under questionable circumstances.

This week was capped off with the release of several excerpts from an upcoming tell-all book on Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump.

"Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump" is written by journalist Vicky Ward and provides a close look at Kushner's and Ivanka's journey to the White House.

The book, like the many other accounts from former Trump administration officials, is sourced from dozens of inside sources and paints an unflattering picture of the Trump administration. But Ward's book differs in that it focuses on Kushner and Ivanka's path to the White House, on Trump's coattails "where no one, the President included, has been able to stop them."




ANN COULTER SAYS JARED KUSHNER COULD BE TAKEN DOWN FOR 'BUYING HIS HARVARD ADMISSION' BEFORE MUELLER INDICTS HIM
https://www.newsweek.com/ann-coulter-jared-kushner-taken-down-harvard-admission-mueller-indictment-1362190

Conservative political pundit Ann Coulter ripped President Donald Trump's son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner on Tuesday by asking whether he will be taken down for his father "buying" his Harvard University admission before getting indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller.

"BLIND ITEM: Which top presidential advisor could be in hot water over his father buying his Harvard admission SOONER than he'll be indicted by Mueller?" Coulter tweeted, along with the hashtag #CollegeCheatingScandal.

https://twitter.com/AnnCoulter/status/1105643044978769920

Though Coulter did not name Kushner in the tweet, it was obvious he was the top presidential adviser she referenced. Just an hour earlier that night, she mentioned the Kushners in reference to the college admissions scandal.

"Boy, the price has gone up! Charles Kushner paid Harvard a mere $2.5 million to get Jared into Harvard," Coulter tweeted. "CNN: Parents paid up to $6.5 million to get their kids into college. #CollegeCheatingScandal"

Kushner's acceptance into Harvard came under scrutiny again after 50 people were charged Tuesday in the largest college admissions bribery case the Department of Justice has ever prosecuted. Among those charged were major players in finance, CEOs, college sports coaches and actors, including Full House's Lori Loughlin.

ProPublica editor Daniel Golden investigated Kushner's admission into the Ivy League school in his 2006 book The Price of Admission. In 2016, Golden wrote a story about his book, zeroing in on a $2.5 million donation that Kushner's father, real estate developer Charles Kushner, made to Harvard in 1998. Kushner was accepted into the university shortly after. Golden wrote that Kushner's grades and test scores did not seem competitive enough to merit acceptance.

A spokeswoman for the family real estate business Kushner Companies, Risa Heller, said it was "false" that there was a link between Jared Kushner's admission and his father's donation.

Kushner's parents "are enormously generous and have donated over 100 million dollars to universities, hospitals and other charitable causes," Heller said at the time, adding, "Jared Kushner was an excellent student in high school and graduated from Harvard with honors."

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSvkel7hqwg

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Opinion | Who Do Jared and Ivanka Think They Are?
https://mediaone.us/opinion-who-do-jared-and-ivanka-think-they-are/

Many high achievers, particularly women and people of color, suffer from impostor syndrome, the fear that they don't belong in the rarefied realm to which they've ascended and that they will soon be found out. Even Michelle Obama, who is, according to a Gallup poll conducted last year, the most admired woman in America, has said that she feels it. "I share that with you because we all have doubts in our abilities, about our power and what that power is," she told students in London in December.

Well, maybe not all of us. I've just finished Vicky Ward's "Kushner, Inc.," a scintillating investigation of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump's White House sojourn, which comes out on Tuesday. It's full of damning details: contempt for the entitled, venal couple may be the one thing that unites all of D.C.'s warring factions. Still, the first daughter and her husband remain psychologically mysterious, at least to me. Why don't they have impostor syndrome, given that their total lack of qualifications for the jobs they are doing makes them actual impostors?

According to "Kushner, Inc.," Gary Cohn, former director of the National Economic Council, has told people that Ivanka Trump thinks she could someday be president. "Her father's reign in Washington, D.C., is, she believes, the beginning of a great American dynasty," writes Ward. Kushner, whose pre-White House experience included owning a boutique newspaper and helming a catastrophically ill-timed real estate deal, has arrogated to himself substantial parts of American foreign policy. According to Ward, shortly after Rex Tillerson was confirmed as secretary of state, Kushner told him "to leave Mexico to him because he'd have Nafta wrapped up by October."

As political actors, the couple are living exemplars of the Dunning-Kruger effect https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10626367  , a psychological phenomenon which leads incompetent people to overestimate their ability because they can't grasp how much they don't know.

Partly, the Jared and Ivanka story is about the "reality distortion field" — a term one of Ward's sources uses about Kushner — created by great family wealth. She quotes a member of Trump's legal team saying that the two "have no idea how normal people perceive, understand, intuit." Privilege, in them, has been raised to the level of near sociopathy.

Ward, the author of two previous books about the worlds of high finance and real estate, has known Kushner slightly for a long time; she told me that when he bought The New York Observer newspaper in 2006, he tried to hire her. She knocks down the idea that either he or his wife is a stabilizing force or moral compass in the Trump administration. Multiple White House sources told her they think it was Kushner who ordered the closing of White House visitor logs in April 2017, because he "didn't want his frenetic networking exposed." Ward reports that Cohn was stunned by their blasé reaction to Trump's defense of the white-nationalist marchers in Charlottesville, Va.: "He was upset that they were not sufficiently upset."

Still, even if you assume that the couple are amoral climbers, their behavior still doesn't quite make sense. Ward writes that Ivanka's chief concern is her personal brand, but that brand has been trashed. The book cites an October 2017 survey measuring consumer approval of more than 1,600 brands. Ivanka's fashion line was in the bottom 10. A leading real estate developer tells Ward that Kushner, now caught up in multiple state and federal investigations, has become radioactive: "No one will want to do business with him." (Kushner resigned as C.E.O. of Kushner Companies in 2017, but has kept most of his stake in the business.)

To truly make sense of their motivations, Ward told me, you have to understand the gravitational pull of their fathers. Husband and wife are both "really extraordinarily orientated and identified through their respective fathers in a way that most fully formed adults are not," she said.

Among the most interesting parts of "Kushner, Inc.," are the chapters about the business history of Charles Kushner, Jared's felonious father, and his plan to restore his reputation, with Jared's help, after getting out of prison in 2006. Part of that rehabilitation project was the purchase of a flagship building in Manhattan — 666 Fifth Avenue, an absurdly on-the-nose address — for which the family paid a record amount at the very height of the real estate market in 2007. When the Great Recession hit, the building became a white elephant, its debt threatening the family fortune.

Ward's book suggests that the search for someone who would bail out 666 Fifth Avenue has played a significant role in American foreign policy during the Trump administration. And since the completion of her book, we've learned that Trump overrode intelligence officials, who were concerned about Kushner and his family's ties to foreign investors, to give Kushner a security clearance.

In the end, the Kushner family seems to have gotten what it wanted. Last year, Brookfield Asset Management, which has substantial investment from the government of Qatar's sovereign wealth fund, came to the Kushners' rescue. (The Qataris have denied any advance knowledge of the deal.)

"You'll notice that the U.S. position toward Qatar changes when the Qataris bail out 666 Fifth Avenue," said Ward, adding, "We look like a banana republic." Maybe that's why Jared and Ivanka appear so blithely confident. As public servants, they're obviously way out of their depth. But as self-dealing scions of a gaudy autocracy? They're naturals.