Tag Archives: Ivanka Trump

DC riot, national news

‘They’ll go after children’

Donald J. Trump has every right to defend his grown kids. However, he ought to rethink — which he won’t do — his stated belief that the 1/6 House committee will “go after children.”

Here is part of what Trump said about a request from the committee to hear from Ivanka Trump: ā€œIt’s a disgrace, what’s going on. They’re using these things to try and get people’s minds off how incompetently our country is being run. And they don’t care. They’ll go after children.”

Oh, good grief.

Ivanka Trump is a grown woman who served during Daddy Trump’s term in office as a senior adviser. She was on the federal payroll, dammit, drawn a salary to advise her father on matters relating to public policy.

She is not a child. It’s as if the House select committee asked to speak with Trump’s son Barron, a teenager who his parents have kept out of the glaring public eye. Oh, no. Ivanka is part of the Trump presidential team and well might have information that the committee needs to collect to help it assess what Daddy Donald on 1/6 when the riotous insurrectionist mob stormed Capitol Hill in an effort to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results.

Ivanka Trump crossed the line that separates family from public figure. As such, the House committee has every right and reason to ask her to tell lawmakers what she knows and when she knew it.

johnkanelis_92@hotmail.com

national news

When did Jared find peace in the Middle East?

I must have missed something regarding the tasks assigned to Jared “The Grifter-in-Law” Kushner.

Wasn’t he assigned to craft a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement, one that allows Israel to rest knowing that it never would be threatened by its neighbors? Did he finish the job?

Now I hear the president of the United States, the father of Kushner’s wife, wants the young man to oversee construction of The Wall along our nation’s southern border.

Wow! Talk about multi-tasking!

Kushner, of course, has no business serving as a senior policy adviser to the president. Neither does his wife, Ivanka, for that matter. They hold those posts because Donald Trump cannot find senior advisers with actual experience in world affairs. Folks with actual relationships with world leaders. Those with real-life knowledge of what it takes to find peace, to keep peace and to build international alliances.

So the POTUS turned to his daughter and son-in-law. Their so-called “qualifications” utterly mystify me.

Now Jared Kushner gets a new task. How does he have the time? He’s also in charge of trade policy, innovation, not to mention a growing list of other jobs.

Get cracking! Build that wall, Jared!

national news

Is it really all that unbelievable?

I am having a bit of trouble wrapping my arms around this latest personnel shift within the White House.

Madeleine Westerhout no longer serves as Donald Trump’s personal secretary. Trump fired her allegedly because of remarks she made to reporters that suggested that she gets along better with the president than his own daughters, Ivanka and Tiffany.

What’s more, Westerhout told reporters that the president doesn’t like being photographed with Tiffany because he considers her to be, um, overweight.Ā Tiffany Trump is the daughter the president produced with his second wife, Marla Maples. She keeps a low profile, out of the public eye — unlike, of course, daughter Ivanka.

OK, so Trump canned Westerhout. The president reportedly called Tiffany to assure her he didn’t say what Westerhout said he did. He told reporters that he loves Tiffany.

So, is any of that totally unbelievable? I mean, Trump does have this curiously boorish way of talking about women, even those within his own family. I believe he once said he would “date” Ivanka, but for the fact that, well ā€¦ she’s his daughter.Ā I don’t know about you, but that kind of remark gives me the creeps.

To be fair, Madeleine Westerhout shouldn’t have said those things to reporters about her boss, the president of the United States. Trump was right to let her go.

However, does anyone out there actually disbelieve the contents of all that she supposedly said?

national news

What is Jared doing to our foreign policy?

One of Donald Trump’s “best people” is being heard once again.

He is former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who went from hero to zero in less than two years. Trump hired him as the nation’s top diplomat, heaping praise on the former ExxonMobil CEO as a man of unsurpassed brilliance; he booted him out, saying he was dumb as a stump.

But the former secretary of state is being heard again. He is telling interviewers about how the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner — a young man with zero diplomatic experience — pushed Tillerson aside to conduct foreign policy ā€¦ in the Middle East, of all places!

Tillerson met with the House Foreign Relations Committee recently and gave a scathing report on working within the Trump White House. According to the Daily Beast: ā€œOne of the challenges I think that everyone hadā€¦ to learn to deal with was the role, the unique situation with the presidentā€™s son-in-law [Kushner] and daughter [Ivanka] being part of the White House advisory team,ā€ Tillerson said, according to the transcript The Daily Beast obtained. ā€œThere was not a real clear understanding of the role, responsibilities, authoritiesā€¦ which made it challenging for everyone, I think, in terms of how to deal with activities that might be undertaken by others that were not defined within the national-security process itself.ā€

I want to stress with all the energy I can muster that Jared Kushner has no business conducting sensitive negotiations with Middle East heads of government and heads of state. He is as totally unqualified to negotiate with anyone in that region as the president is to hold the office to which he was elected. Yet the president has given this hanger-on the responsibility of hammering out a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East?

Let’s face it, Rex Tillerson was right when he called Trump a “fu**ing moron,” an epithet he never has denied hurling in the president’s direction.

And the president has placed an empty suit in charge of one of the most challenging diplomatic tasks anywhere on Earth.

Amazing.

national news

Jared Kushner is 100 percent wrong! Imagine that!

Jared Kushner married well when he joined with Ivanka Trump all those years ago. Now the two of them are “senior advisers” to the president of the United States, Ivanka’s father, Donald J. Trump.

None of that, though, makes Jared Kushner an expert on anything to do with the federal government or with the tedious work of a special counsel.

Thus, when he says that special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged “collusion” with Russians who hacked into our electoral system did more damage to the country than the Russian attack itself, he is pi**ing into the wind.

The young man doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Then again, maybe he does. Perhaps he is trying to avoid incurring the wrath of his father-in-law, who has this propensity for inflicting extreme hurt on those he feels are “disloyal” to him.

Kushner made the preposterous claim today, saying that all the Russians did was take a “couple of Facebook ads” in their effort to interfere in the 2016 presidential election. Oh, no, Jared. They did a whole lot more than that.

They launched a systematic, calculated attack on our electoral system seeking to sow discord and to put Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee, into the worst light possible.

Mueller concluded his investigation by saying that the Trump campaign did not conspire to collude with Russian goons. He also left the door wide open to further congressional inquiry into whether the president obstructed justice. Mueller climbed atop mountains of evidence and reached what I believe was a carefully considered conclusion.

Mueller’s narrative has been scathing in its characterization of the amorality, ineptness, deception and corruption of the Trump campaign.

To suggest, though, that the investigation has done more harm than the Russian attack on a fundamental element of our system of government is beyond absurd. Jared Kushner’s assertion is disgusting and reprehensible on its face.

I’ll stick with the description of Robert Mueller from Ty Cobb, one of the president’s former lawyers, who calls Mueller — a decorated combat Marine and former FBI director — an “American hero.”

Jared Kushner? He is nothing of the sort.

national news

Security clearance plot thickens

So now the plot continues to thicken inside the White House.

A longtime White House staffer who works on issuing security clearances for key administration personnel has told congressional investigators that the Trump administration has issued top-secret clearances to individuals who had been denied them for a variety of reasons.

Tricia Newbold has worked under four administrations, Democrat and Republican, dating back to 2000. She said the Trump White House has been amazingly lax in its security-clearance procedures. Imagine that, will ya? Who knew?

As the New York Times has reported:

Described as both ā€œno nonsenseā€ and ā€œintenseā€ by people who have interacted with her during the clearance process, Ms. Newbold has served under four presidential administrations, beginning with the Clinton White House in 2000. Eventually she worked her way up to adjudications manager, a job that required her to help make determinations about the security clearances of administration employees. Her office is filled with holdovers from other administrations, and it is meant to be nonpartisan.

Yet in the Trump administration the office was filled with people who had little experience in vetting employees in the interest of national security, Ms. Newbold said in a nine-hour deposition with the House Committee on Oversight and Reform last week.

I keep thinking of presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, garnering clearances even though neither of them had a lick of national security experience prior to Daddy Trump becoming president of the United States.

The president denied running interference for either of them. Others have reported, though, that he most certainly did.

Again, from the NY Times:

John F. Kelly, the president’s former chief of staff, wrote in a contemporaneous internal memo about how he had been “ordered” to give Mr. Kusher the top-secret clearance. In her interviews with the House committee, Ms. Newbold said that Mr. Kelly and Joe Hagin, the former deputy chief of staff, had been attentive to the national security issues she had tried to raise.

Gosh, do you think there might be a national security risk being presented inside the White House’s West Wing?

I do. It frightens me.

national news

Ivanka and Jared privileged? No-o-o-o!

I have sought to keep quiet about Ivanka Trump, daughter of the president of the United States. I guess it’s time to speak about her.

It’s not that I relish taking shots at a president’s daughter. Ivanka Trump, though, isn’t your run-of-the-mill presidential “child.” She is a senior policy adviser to her father, as is her husband, Jared Kushner.

The pair now have become subjects of a book that details how they parlayed their kinship to the president to acquire enormous power within the West Wing of the White House and how they attained that power with no discernible credentials — other than Ivanka’s father is the president.

Kushner Inc.

The book is titled “Kushner, Inc.” and chronicles how both of them were the children of domineering fathers who greased their entry into the business world. The book, though, does say that Donald Trump was a “disengaged” father during Ivanka’s coming of age years.

Vicky Ward wrote the book and it is sure to bring out the Trump critics who will note that Ivanka and Jared are given tasks for which they have no qualifications. Ivanka supposedly works on job creation for women; Jared is in charge of forging a Middle East peace.

The way I see it, Jared Kushner is the one who is farther out of his league. He has zero credentials negotiating a diplomatic solution to centuries of warfare among people with historic hatred for each other.

Yep. They’re grifters. Their benefactor, the president, has said that qualified individuals are banging on the door seeking to work within his administration. He calls them the “best people.”

Ivanka and Jared do not qualify by any measure to be of the quality required for the access they have to the nation’s most sensitive secrets.

business news

Ivanka Trump said what? No one wants a free ride? Wow!

Robert Reich, the outspoken critic of the Donald Trump administration, posted an item on Facebook that needs to be shared here.

In an interview, Ivanka Trump claimed that most Americans ā€œin their heartsā€ donā€™t want to be given something for free, criticizing proposals for a federal jobs guarantee.

Excuse me? Ivanka and her siblings stand to inherit a fortune. And, if Mitch McConnell gets his ways and eliminates the estate tax, they won’t pay a dime on their inheritance. An estimated 60 percent of wealth in America is now inherited.

Ivanka, the American people want fairness, not handouts and nepotism — something you’re quite familiar with.

My jaw just hit the deck when I saw what the First Daughter said.

Americans “in their hearts” don’t want a free ride . . . she said.

Let me think for a moment: Her father was staked by his wealthy dad, Ivanka’s grandpa, hundreds of millions of dollars to start a business. Donald Trump built a business, albeit with some failures along the way.

Then he produced Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric with his first wife. Tiffany came along during Dad’s second marriage. Donald’s third marriage produced Barron, who remains off limits for criticism.

Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric have been “given” all the comforts of an opulent lifestyle. They haven’t worked for any of the wealth into which they were born.

For Ivanka to presume to speak for the rest of us who have struggled at times to provide for our families, to be candid, is laughable on its face.

national news

Ivanka: not your run-of-the-mill presidential kin

I know this doesn’t really need to be said, but I’ll offer it anyway.

Ivanka Trump is not your run-of-the-mill presidential family member who is “off limits” from intense media scrutiny. Ivanka is a key member of the president’s team of advisers. He’s a “senior” adviser, in fact, although I don’t know what in the world qualifies her as “senior” anything.

Donald Trump no doubt sees any media inquiry, for example, into her use of a personal e-mail account to conduct government business as an intrusion into a “private matter.” It’s far from it.

Ivanka Trump needs to steel herself for an intense look by Democrats who will run the House of Representatives. So should her dad, the president. So should her brothers, Eric and Don Jr.

So should we all.

Indeed, the only children of Donald Trump who should be exempt from media scrutiny are Tiffany, his daughter with his second wife, Marla Maples, and young Barron, who lives in the White House with the president and first lady Melania Trump.

Daddy Trump says there’s no comparison between what Ivanka has done and what former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did when she used her personal e-mail account while she ran the State Department.

But . . . what Ivanka Trump has allegedly done is worth a careful look by Congress. She should be called to testify before, say, the House Oversight Committee and forced to answer questions under oath about what she put out there for all the world to see.

She’s not just a “first daughter” who deserves to be left alone. She’s part of the president’s inner circle, a cog in Donald Trump’s “fine-tuned machine.”

national news

Hypocrisy is flourishing in the White House!

Let’s just call him the Hypocrite in Chief.

Donald J. Trump has been caught in yet another example of bald-faced, categorical and unqualified hypocrisy.

His daughter Ivanka has been caught using her personal e-mail account to transmit messages pertaining to government business. Was any of it classified? Was she able to send messages that compromised our national security? Oh, probably not.

But the point is this: Daddy Trump spent two whole years telling the world that in his view Hillary Clinton committed “several felonies” while using her personal e-mail while she was secretary of state. He led chants of “Lock her up!” at campaign rallies.

Now his older daughter is caught doing essentially the same thing. His response? Pfftt! Not parallel, he says.

Moreover, he called Clinton “stupid” for not knowing the rules. Was all of that lost on Ivanka, who now says she didn’t know the rules about e-mail use when she took her post as a senior adviser to her father?

Remember, too, how he criticized President Obama for playing too much golf? How he — Trump — wouldn’t have time to play golf, that he’ll be too busy “making America great again”?

He’s turned Obama into a weekend duffer. This president, the guy who ridiculed his predecessor unjustly, has lapped the field — and then some! — with his golf outings.

I do not begrudge the golf per se. I’ve said all along that presidents are never off the clock; they remain in constant contact with their key aides, advisers and national security team.

I do begrudge the golf only because of Trump’s hypocrisy on that matter — and on so many others.

Simply astonishing.