Ivanka and Jared 2: Tarnished Gold

[GreyhoundFan]

@AmazonGrace -- Politico is reporting that Elijah Cummings and the House Oversight Committee is investigating the whole security clearance mess, with Jared front and center.

Spoiler

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said on Thursday that his wide-ranging investigation into the White House's process for issuing security clearances "explicitly covers" Jared Kushner, after a new report characterized the way the White House senior adviser obtained his clearance as unprecedented.

"My request letter to the White House explicitly covers Mr. Kushner, and we expect the White House to produce all of the documents and interviews we requested to determine if tonight’s breaking story is accurate," Cummings (D-Md.) said.

"The system is supposed to be a nonpartisan determination of an individual’s fitness to hold a clearance, not an ad hoc approach that overrules career experts to give the President’s family members access to our nation’s most sensitive secrets."

Kushner's application for a top secret security clearance was turned down by two career specialists who were then overruled in an unusual way by their superior, according to NBC's report.

Kushner, the president's son-in-law, was one of at least 30 cases in which former Pentagon employee Carl Kline turned down the advice of career specialists and granted top secret clearances, despite apparently concerning information existing. The report is based on two sources "familiar with the matter," which POLITICO has not independently verified.

The request for Kushner clearance was hampered by his FBI background investigation, according to the report, which "identified questions about his family's business, his foreign contacts, his foreign travel and meetings he had during the campaign."

Cumming's probe, as POLITICO previously reported, also concerns a number of former administration officials including: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia during the transition; Rob Porter, a former White House staff secretary who resigned after multiple allegations of domestic abuse; and former deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka.

 

[Audrey2]

2 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

@AmazonGrace -- Politico is reporting that Elijah Cummings and the House Oversight Committee is investigating the whole security clearance mess, with Jared front and center.

  Reveal hidden contents

Rep. Elijah Cummings, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said on Thursday that his wide-ranging investigation into the White House's process for issuing security clearances "explicitly covers" Jared Kushner, after a new report characterized the way the White House senior adviser obtained his clearance as unprecedented.

"My request letter to the White House explicitly covers Mr. Kushner, and we expect the White House to produce all of the documents and interviews we requested to determine if tonight’s breaking story is accurate," Cummings (D-Md.) said.

"The system is supposed to be a nonpartisan determination of an individual’s fitness to hold a clearance, not an ad hoc approach that overrules career experts to give the President’s family members access to our nation’s most sensitive secrets."

Kushner's application for a top secret security clearance was turned down by two career specialists who were then overruled in an unusual way by their superior, according to NBC's report.

Kushner, the president's son-in-law, was one of at least 30 cases in which former Pentagon employee Carl Kline turned down the advice of career specialists and granted top secret clearances, despite apparently concerning information existing. The report is based on two sources "familiar with the matter," which POLITICO has not independently verified.

The request for Kushner clearance was hampered by his FBI background investigation, according to the report, which "identified questions about his family's business, his foreign contacts, his foreign travel and meetings he had during the campaign."

Cumming's probe, as POLITICO previously reported, also concerns a number of former administration officials including: former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia during the transition; Rob Porter, a former White House staff secretary who resigned after multiple allegations of domestic abuse; and former deputy assistant to the president Sebastian Gorka.

 

Would I be a bad person if I said that I wish Jared Kushner would get the full Roger Stone FBI treatment?

Also, was anyone else singing the theme song from COPS this morning?

[onekidanddone]

18 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

Would I be a bad person if I said that I wish Jared Kushner would get the full Roger Stone FBI treatment?

Also, was anyone else singing the theme song from COPS this morning?

I didn't think of COPS, good one.  Locomotive Breath is running though my mind though. So has this song.

Because grief will come in measures
Only grief alone will know
And you'll see it on your family
On your own face it will grow
And they'll try to keep you hungry
Then they'll tell you to eat snow
You know pride can be a moving thing
If we learn the strength of "NO!"

Lyrics:

Quote

They said some men would be warriors
And some men would be kings
And some men would be owners of land
And other man-made things
And false love as the eternal flame
Would move some to think in rings
And gold would be our power
And other foolish things

But you who dream of liberty
Must not yourselves be fooled
Before you get to plea for freedom
You have agreed to be ruled
If the body stays a shackle
Then the mind remains a chain
That'll link you to a destiny
Wherby all good souls are slain

And it won't take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"What has that got to do with me?"
And I say "You mean to tell me that's all?"

Of three men in a desert wandering
One is knowing and two are scared
They say time is in the river
But the river is not there
Dry in spirit dry in body
Two will lend themselves to death
And in grief one weeps into his hands
And drinks his bitter tears

'Cause it don't take long
It don't take too long at all
It don't take long, and you may say
"I don't know what you're talking about,"
And I say "You mean to tell me that's all?"

And as I stand before you now
I am hopeful in my rage
You know love has finally called for me
I will not wilt upon its stage
But still smaller than my nightmare
Do I print upon the page
Do we have to live inside its walls
To identify the cage?

'Cause it takes so long
Why does it take so long
But it takes so long, and you may say
"I don't really care what you're talking about,"
And I say, "Are you trying to say you don't belong?"

I am my mother's daughter
But I have seen myself in you
It's this blessing that I follow now
And so I must speak true
I dreamed of thousands dying
It was you and you and you
And while the city sleeps so quietly
There is something we must do

And it won't' take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"I don't know if I wanna know what you're getting at,"
And it makes me wanna say, "So long."

Because grief will come in measures
Only grief alone will know
And you'll see it on your family
On your own face it will grow
And they'll try to keep you hungry
Then they'll tell you to eat snow
You know pride can be a moving thing
If we learn the strength of "NO!"

And it won't take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"I don't think this has anything to do with me,"
"But did you ever think you could be wrong?"

At noon on one day coming
Human strength will fill the streets
Of every city on our planet
Hear the sound of angry feet
With business freezed up in the harbour
The kings will pull upon their hair
And the banks will shudder to a halt
And the artists will be there

'Cause it won't take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"I don't think I can be a part of that,"
And it makes me want to say
"Don't you want to see yourself that strong?"

Division between the peoples
Will disappear that honoured day
And though oceans lie between us
Lifted candles light the way
Half will join their hands by moonlight
The rest under a rising sun
As underneath the sun and moon
A ritual'd wailing has begun

And it won't take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"I don't know how to be a part of what you're talking about,"
And it makes me want to say, "Come on!"

And beware you sagging diplomats
For you will not hear one gun
And though our homes be torn
And ransacked we will not be undone
For as we let ourselves be bought
We're gonna let ourselves be free
And if you think we stand alone
Look again and you will see:

We are children in the rafters
We are babies in the park
We are lovers at the movies
We are candles in the dark
We are changes in the weather
We are snowflakes in July
We are women grown together
We are men who easily cry
We are words not quickly spoken
We're the deeper side of try
We are dreamers in the making
We are not afraid of "Why?

 

Edited January 25, 2019 by onekidanddone
ETA: My I swear I have this weird OCD where I have to add song lyrics to things going on.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[LeftCoastLurker]

So...wondering if they own any property in any countries without extradition treaties with the US?

[onekidanddone]

I can’t wait until Muller says he went to Jared

Disclaimer: I was running Waze  on my phone but #besthubbyeverbecauseonedayhebroughthomemilk was driving 

 

Edited February 4, 2019 by onekidanddone

[AmazonGrace]

Ivanka was on ABC (the interviewer's father is Trump's ambassador to Russia) and lied a lot, unchecked.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ivanka-trump-concern-special-counsel-robert-muellers-investigation/story?id=60926680

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-special-treatment-security-clearances/story?id=60940398

[AmazonGrace]

Because of course they are

 

[Howl]

I'm seeing one reference on Twitter and one reference online that a Kushner residence on Long Island is being raided.  Don't know yet what this is about, if anything.  Lots of LE cars are being reported near the residence, which would be the house of (I think) Dad Kushner, rather than Jared and Ivanka.  Wouldn't this also be the start of Jewish sabbath?  The Kushners are all observant Jews. 

Could be something, could be nothing. 

ETA: Never mind! I think it's a rumor started on a Yahoo neighborhood group.  It's not being picked up by any of the MSM newsgroups. 

 

Edited February 9, 2019 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Let them eat a dollar

[AmazonGrace]

We had an extra billion and forgot where we put it.

 

[fraurosena]

Oh my! The presiduncial tantrum will be epic when this happens.

House Democrats may target Ivanka Trump in their Russia probe

Quote

Outlining a blueprint for the vast Russia probe planned by the new House majority, a Democratic member of Congress suggested at a roundtable with reporters this week that lawmakers may seek testimony from Ivanka Trump.

[..] The lawmaker said Democrats have "made no decision as to Ivanka Trump," but "obviously there are a number of public reports about her involvement in the Trump Tower Moscow deal, and she may very well have relevant information."

"[W]e will ... sequence the interviews that we do with an eye towards knowing as much as we can before we bring in potential witnesses."

In describing an investigative machine that will run parallel to Mueller, the member of Congress said that "the issue of potential Gulf money is the second-largest area of concern after Russia."

"[T]hey may be distinct but overlapping when it comes to, for example, funding the inauguration. There may have been efforts to illegally funnel Russian money as well as Gulf money."

The lawmaker also pointed to "public reports of seeking to get money in the Gulf to support a clandestine social media effort to help the Trump campaign."

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[Howl]

Yup, since the  BMW X3, X4, X5, X6 and X7 SUV models are manufactured at BMW's Spartanburg plant in Greer, South Carolina.  That plant cranks out Beemers at the rate of 1,900/day, the highest production volume of any BMW plant in the world! (Thanks, WIKI). 

And nobody seems to know what Ivanka was doing at a security conference.  China and Russia were there; just sayin'. 

 

Edited February 17, 2019 by Howl

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

Because of course they do 

 

[Howl]

On 1/25/2019 at 10:37 AM, onekidanddone said:

So has this song.

Because grief will come in measures
Only grief alone will know
And you'll see it on your family
On your own face it will grow
And they'll try to keep you hungry
Then they'll tell you to eat snow
You know pride can be a moving thing
If we learn the strength of "NO!"

 

Wow.  My world shifted on its axis a little.  I read the lyrics and then listened while reading the lyrics.  So beautiful and powerful. The weight of all things Trump just lifted off my shoulders. 

Lyrics: 

Spoiler

 

They said some men would be warriors
And some men would be kings
And some men would be owners of land
And other man-made things
And false love as the eternal flame
Would move some to think in rings
And gold would be our power
And other foolish things

But you who dream of liberty
Must not yourselves be fooled
Before you get to plea for freedom
You have agreed to be ruled
If the body stays a shackle
Then the mind remains a chain
That'll link you to a destiny
Wherby all good souls are slain

And it won't take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"What has that got to do with me?"
And I say "You mean to tell me that's all?"

Of three men in a desert wandering
One is knowing and two are scared
They say time is in the river
But the river is not there
Dry in spirit dry in body
Two will lend themselves to death
And in grief one weeps into his hands
And drinks his bitter tears

'Cause it don't take long
It don't take too long at all
It don't take long, and you may say
"I don't know what you're talking about,"
And I say "You mean to tell me that's all?"

And as I stand before you now
I am hopeful in my rage
You know love has finally called for me
I will not wilt upon its stage
But still smaller than my nightmare
Do I print upon the page
Do we have to live inside its walls
To identify the cage?

'Cause it takes so long
Why does it take so long
But it takes so long, and you may say
"I don't really care what you're talking about,"
And I say, "Are you trying to say you don't belong?"

I am my mother's daughter
But I have seen myself in you
It's this blessing that I follow now
And so I must speak true
I dreamed of thousands dying
It was you and you and you
And while the city sleeps so quietly
There is something we must do

And it won't' take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"I don't know if I wanna know what you're getting at,"
And it makes me wanna say, "So long."

Because grief will come in measures
Only grief alone will know
And you'll see it on your family
On your own face it will grow
And they'll try to keep you hungry
Then they'll tell you to eat snow
You know pride can be a moving thing
If we learn the strength of "NO!"

And it won't take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"I don't think this has anything to do with me,"
"But did you ever think you could be wrong?"

At noon on one day coming
Human strength will fill the streets
Of every city on our planet
Hear the sound of angry feet
With business freezed up in the harbour
The kings will pull upon their hair
And the banks will shudder to a halt
And the artists will be there

'Cause it won't take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"I don't think I can be a part of that,"
And it makes me want to say
"Don't you want to see yourself that strong?"

Division between the peoples
Will disappear that honoured day
And though oceans lie between us
Lifted candles light the way
Half will join their hands by moonlight
The rest under a rising sun
As underneath the sun and moon
A ritual'd wailing has begun

And it won't take long
It won't take too long at all
It won't take long, and you may say
"I don't know how to be a part of what you're talking about,"
And it makes me want to say, "Come on!"

And beware you sagging diplomats
For you will not hear one gun
And though our homes be torn
And ransacked we will not be undone
For as we let ourselves be bought
We're gonna let ourselves be free
And if you think we stand alone
Look again and you will see:

We are children in the rafters
We are babies in the park
We are lovers at the movies
We are candles in the dark
We are changes in the weather
We are snowflakes in July
We are women grown together
We are men who easily cry
We are words not quickly spoken
We're the deeper side of try
We are dreamers in the making
We are not afraid of "Why?

 

 

Edited February 24, 2019 by Howl

[GreyhoundFan]

I love Jack Ohman:

 

[Howl]

More Ivanka peak irony, or is it unintentional satire?

 

[WiseGirl]

Oh Ivanka, I hope you realize AOC is not the woman to irritate. On the other hand, watching AOC help bring you down would bring me great joy.

https://nypost.com/2019/02/26/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-fires-back-at-ivanka-trump-i-worked-for-tips/

https://thehill.com/homenews/house/431716-ocasio-cortez-responds-to-ivanka-trump-a-living-wage-isnt-a-gift-its-a-right

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Ivanka Trump doesn’t understand work. No one in the Trump administration does."

Spoiler

In an interview with Fox News Monday night, senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump took time out of her usual tasks of failing to positively influence her father or materially affect the Trump administration’s policy to opine to Fox host Steve Hilton about the minimum-guaranteed-income plank of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal plan. “I think that this idea of a guaranteed minimum is not something most people want,” Trump said, providing no evidence whatsoever. “They want the ability to be able to secure a job. They want the ability to live in a country where’s there’s the potential for upward mobility.”

Guaranteed minimum incomes are, many economists state, precisely what some people need to have upward mobility — they are drivers of it, not inhibitors. Trump’s assumptions about the relationship between work and poverty are typical of her father’s administration’s obliviousness to the needs and circumstances of Americans who are struggling financially. Trump, her father, President Trump, her husband, Jared Kushner, and many of their colleagues — Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, etc. — who claim to be acting on behalf of the working classes behave as if they’ve never encountered members of that particular economic strata.

That’s because for the most part, they haven’t. Aside from the service workers they encounter and people they employ in working-class jobs, they spend the bulk of their time around other wealthy elites. But worse, none of them has experienced the conditions that lead people to need basic income guarantees or how dangerously close many Americans are to poverty even when fully employed. When the government shut down for a record length of time earlier this year, Ross suggested that furloughed federal workers just take out loans to cover expenses for things such as food and housing, then pay them back once salaries resumed. (His own agency’s credit union was offering short-term loans at 9 percent interest.) In a country where 40 percent of American households are one paycheck away from living at the poverty level, Ross said he didn’t “really quite understand why” federal workers were going to food banks after going a few weeks without pay. For a rich guy, of course, who cares if the cost of the shutdown and Trump’s inability to negotiate gets dumped on the workers, in the form of interest and fees the government has no intention of reimbursing them for, to cover the sudden disappearance of the salaries they were due? Let them eat cake, Ross argued, and let them pay extra for it because we’re all out of bread, and it’s their fault, somehow.

Why are members of the Trump family and the Trump administration — indistinguishable in some cases — so oblivious to the needs and lives of poor and struggling Americans? One reason is that they all view themselves as essentially “self-made” despite having grown up with wealth that has enabled them to get much further ahead than the Americans whose work ethic they judge. In fact, they started out ahead. President Trump portrays himself as a successful bootstrapped businessman, although his father gave him what he calls a “small loan” that amounted to $60 million. Ivanka Trump wrote a book titled “Women Who Work” that’s mostly an exercise in self-congratulation for holding down a job in her father’s corporation while supported by a small army of nannies and household help.

I’ve experienced this personally with Kushner, who was my boss at the New York Observer several years ago, when he was still ostensibly a Democrat. I mentioned in the course of conversation that my dad had been a local lineman for Alabama Power and had worked as a contractor on the side to make ends meet — entrepreneurialism by necessity. Kushner replied that he could relate because he thought of himself as “self-made” in a way. When I asked him to elaborate, he conflated entrepreneurialism in general with bootstrapping and waxed about his first real business: buying up residential real estate in Cambridge, Mass., during his tenure at Harvard (admission secured by a generous donation to the university) and flipping it.

Even though this line of thinking is utterly appalling, I have to cut Kushner some slack because I’ve heard it in various incarnations from many people who have gobs of family money that they’ve used to capitalize entrepreneurial ventures. It is not unique to Kushner. It’s endemic to a certain type of wealthy person, who will not or cannot acknowledge, even to themselves, that they’ve started the marathon we’re all forced to run well rested at mile 25. It’s too ego-bruising, and an acknowledgment might force introspection and realistic evaluation of one’s own abilities. If you’re at the top of the heap with the smart people and genuine high achievers, it’s deeply flattering to state that you’re there because you, too, are a smart high-achiever and not because you had access to an education you didn’t work for and were raised in a way that afforded you safety and security and took care of your needs (however expansively defined). And if you’re white — which, statistically speaking, most of the richest people in the United States are — you’re afforded a second layer of advantages in that no one will question your competency, underestimate your pain or view you as a threat solely because of your skin color. It is easy for the Trumps, Kushner and others in the administration to delude themselves into thinking that they earned their places at the top of the pile, that much of it wasn’t just handed to them.

But when they entertain these self-delusions, it negatively affects their orientation toward other people.

Trump and his crew have never been in danger of facing dire economic situations, and not only because they’re fully employed. There are things that ruin people’s lives financially every day that have nothing to do with work ethic — and that could never happen to a core member of the Trump administration. No one close to Trump will get thrown into jail for a couple days because they were wrongly entered into a gang database solely by virtue of living in a specific part of public housing or wearing the wrong color shirt, then lose their job because they didn’t show up to work. None of them will ever have to face the possibility of medical bankruptcy while working 60 hours a week. None of them had to drop out of high school or college to care for a sick parent. None of them have to worry about not having access to abortion if birth control fails and being saddled with a child they can’t afford or spending thousands of dollars in medical expenses for carrying a fetus to term and giving the baby up for adoption (which is the only available trajectory that Republicans and the Trump administration want women in this situation to have).

None of the people who face these scenarios deserve to be poor, and we have no meaningful safety net for them. Where there are assistance options, people in this administration worked to make them so onerous that the most vulnerable can’t meet impossible eligibility requirements.

So when Ivanka Trump says that there should be no minimum guaranteed income because people want to work for their money, there are two possibilities: One is that her imagination and sense of empathy are so egregiously stunted that she cannot envision the large and not exactly invisible portion of the population who cannot just work their way out of poverty and genuinely need basic income as a result. The other is that she knows these people exist, and is callously indifferent to whether they live because it doesn’t affect her one way or the other. She can render them abstract because she’s never been personally exposed to the circumstances they face, and barring a giant reversal of her own fortunes, she’ll never have to face or understand their problems.

And of course, she didn’t cultivate this mentality in a vacuum. It comes directly from her father, the president, who’s already demonstrated that he’s willing to damage our entire democracy for personal gain because in his mind, he is the only person who truly matters. And it’s reflected in other members of the administration. Ross doesn’t have to worry about missing a paycheck, so he doesn’t worry about other people missing theirs. White House aide Stephen Miller’s ancestors are immigrants, but he’s in no danger of being deported, so he’s happy to pull the ladder up. Trump’s close circle does not appear to state they have any obligations to other Americans who don’t have their advantages and are suffering because of their policies. Those people just need to get to work.

But telling people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps — an expression that originated as a way to describe an impossible or absurd act — is not a policy prescription. It’s the useless advice of someone enjoying the view from a higher altitude who’s wrongly convinced themselves that they climbed there.

 

[fraurosena]

What is this arrogant little shit doing in Ankara? Why is he meeting first with MBS and then with Erdogan? While we were looking the other way, this is getting way too little attention.

 

[Howl]

Sarah Kendzior is going crazy over non-action re: Jared

 

[Howl]

This is a psychological profile of the dynamic between Ivanka and Trump.  It seems that Jared is the more public face of blatant corruption re MBS  et al. and Ivanka seems to be in the background; in reality she is a powerful influence and is instrumental in keeping her father from going over the edge.  She's also busy, busy, busy making sure her bidness with China gets the most favorable consideration. 

The text embedded in this tweet was a little difficult to read, so I clicked on the pic.twitter.com link below and enlarged the text.  The original text was from April 2017.

 

 

Edited February 28, 2019 by Howl