When President Donald Trump hired John Kelly as his chief of staff, he asked him to make a personnel change.
“Get rid of my kids; get them back to New York.”
The kids he references are his daughter, Ivanka Trump, and Jared Kushner, her husband, who are both advisers to the president.
That detail is included in “Kushner, Inc.,” a book by journalist Vicky Ward. She says she has spoken to more than 200 sources, often anonymously, about the White House couple.
Another standout anecdote, according to The New York Times is Ivanka Trump’s reaction to her father’s comments about a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
He said there “were very fine people on both sides,” a comment that garnered nearly instant outrage.
According to Ward, Ivanka reacted by saying her father “wasn’t a racist,” and that “he didn’t mean it.”
The Times reports that “White House officials have dismissed the book and any coverage of it,” and a spokesman for Kushner told CNN and other outlets that “correcting everything wrong [in the book] would take too long and be pointless.”
The couple was also present in the report by special counsel Robert S. Mueller about Russian interference in the 2016 election.
What do Jared and Ivanka want from their time in Washington? How influential are they? And what will their lives look like after the Trump presidency ends?
Produced by Paige Osburn.
GUESTS
Vicky Ward, Investigative journalist; author, “Kushner Inc”; @VickyPJWard
For more, visit https://the1a.org.
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