Ivanka and Jared 2: Tarnished Gold

[formergothardite]

Is there a possibility Trump tossed out the idea of replacing Pence with Kanye and that is what the meeting was about? Trump is so racist that I could see him thinking having Kanye would automatically get him every single black vote. 

[SPHASH]

1 hour ago, formergothardite said:

Is there a possibility Trump tossed out the idea of replacing Pence with Kanye and that is what the meeting was about? Trump is so racist that I could see him thinking having Kanye would automatically get him every single black vote. 

IIRC very few blacks voted for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton who are much more educated, more intelligent, and better behaved than Kanye. 

I think Trump might replace Pence with SD Gov Kristi Noem who is basically Trump with a vagina.

[Alisamer]

If he was replacing Pence, could that just be announced at his "accepting the nomination" speech, or would it have to be done ahead of that? I don't know how the VP thing works - it seems like the VP should be up for nomination along with the President, to me. Otherwise Trump would just make it Ivanka and be done with it, no bothering with people outside his family.

He might, still.

I also think it's pretty cruel for people to be enabling Kanye in all this. He needs help. Also, Kim or somebody with influence (or power of attorney) over him should have pulled the plug on this "campaign" before it even started. It doesn't only affect him, it has potential to affect the entire country which will ripple out into the entire world. If I was one of his family members I'd be trying to get him committed on a 48-hour-hold or something. Redirect him. Try to take him on a sabbatical to a private island with no internet. Sneak his meds into his food. Do something, before he gets prison time or screws up the entire country. 

[formergothardite]

8 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

If he was replacing Pence, could that just be announced at his "accepting the nomination" speech, or would it have to be done ahead of that? I don't know how the VP thing works - it seems like the VP should be up for nomination along with the President, to me. Otherwise Trump would just make it Ivanka and be done with it, no bothering with people outside his family.

I can't tell if there are any actual laws but it looks like most make the announcement before the accept the nomination speech but people have done it at the speech. 

Trump always seems like he is a combination of creeped out, annoyed and bored with Pence. Now that Biden has a strong, dynamic running mate, I can easily see Trump looking at bland Pence and thinking he needs a new person. 

12 minutes ago, Alisamer said:

I also think it's pretty cruel for people to be enabling Kanye in all this. He needs help. Also, Kim or somebody with influence (or power of attorney) over him should have pulled the plug on this "campaign" before it even started.

I agree. Surely at some point someone could have put a stop to this, especially in a family that has that much media power. Part of me wonders if Kim let him do it because she likes the idea of being first lady, but she has enough plausible deniability that she won't get in any real trouble if this ends up crossing legal lines.  Kim has also hung out with Trump and has been very careful not to criticize him, she could be down with the GOP using Kanye to get Trump elected again. 

[fraurosena]

Thankfully they are so dumb that they're not very good at covering their tracks and keep on putting their feet in their mouths.

 

[WiseGirl]

I never knew Kanye and Jared were such great friends. "Talking about a book Kanye sent me." Oh please, trying to cover your ass.  Now I know I will yell at him as much as I do to his father-in-law using the same colorful language.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Twitler has also corrupted the Voice of America. I remember going to their studio in DC when I was young and being so impressed. Now it's just another propaganda machine for twitler. This makes me so sad.

 

[fraurosena]

Rumors confirmed.

Revealed: Jared Kushner’s Private Channel With Putin’s Money Man

(Lengthy article) 

Quote

On a late afternoon in March, a large military aircraft bearing the Russian Federation insignia descended into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. Its mission: to deliver personal protective equipment and ventilators to nearby hospitals scrambling to treat patients during the peak of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Gov. Andrew Cuomo had pleaded for weeks with the federal government for additional resources, particularly ventilators, to treat the thousands of COVID-19 patients across the state. Yet news of the Russian delivery surprised those in the governor’s office working to obtain additional medical equipment. They’d thought the ventilator support would come from the U.S. stockpile or from an American company.

Officials in the U.S. State Department were surprised, too. Despite a department press release announcing the delivery, several senior officials working on the Russia portfolio in the department and elsewhere in the national security apparatus were unaware exactly how the 45 ventilators had ended up on American soil. Half of the shipment was paid for by the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), one of the country’s sovereign wealth funds, which is under U.S. sanctions. (The sanctions do not prohibit all transactions between U.S. entities and the firm, but they have limited the fund’s interactions with American businesses.) And the fund’s CEO, Kirill Dmitriev, had been scrutinized by Congress and former special counsel Robert Mueller for his communications with Trump transition officials shortly after Moscow had meddled in the 2016 election.

For years, the Trump administration had attempted to find ways to cooperate with Russia on the world stage but largely failed in those efforts because Moscow has continued to engage in activity that threatens U.S. national security, from hacking operations to reportedly offering bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan. A public display of Russian supplies being offloaded caught some officials in the Trump administration off guard. 

But there was a simple answer to the whodunit. The Federal Emergency Management Administration (FEMA) told The Daily Beast it had assigned the State Department “to represent the U.S. in the transaction with the Government of Russia.” But it was President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who helped facilitate the ventilator delivery, according to two senior administration officials. During the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, Kushner headed “Project Airbridge”—the medical supply delivery program that worked to fast-track the delivery of personal protective equipment and other medical supplies by using federal funding to underwrite the cost of shipping. In an effort to supply New York City hospitals with the medical equipment they needed, Kushner looked in multiple places for the equipment and found a safe bet in Moscow, those officials said. While the State Department had been involved in the logistics of the onboarding and offloading, it was Kushner who helped strike the deal.

The ventilators turned out to be faulty and were cast aside by officials in New York and New Jersey, according to local officials who spoke with The Daily Beast. During that same time period, the city of Los Angeles was told by representatives of the federal government that it had lost a bid for N95 masks to a Russian entity, according to two people familiar with the matter. The L.A. officials were never told the Russian outfit’s name. 

Kushner held the details of the New York shipment closely and accelerated the order by leaning on his personal relationship with Dmitriev, a confidant of President Vladimir Putin who’d been dispatched to make inroads with the inexperienced 2016 Trump transition team. 

Dmitriev was one of the main participants in the infamous January 2017 Seychelles meeting with former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, in which the two discussed a roadmap for U.S.-Russia cooperation in the new administration. In the years since, Kushner and Dmitriev have communicated—often at a distance, and at times through intermediaries—about ways the U.S. and Russia could work together. The conversations have touched on everything from creating a joint business council to increase investment, to working on a Middle East peace deal, to helping lead negotiations on a recent OPEC deal, to delivering those medical supplies, according to multiple senior officials. 

More than a dozen Trump administration officials, current and former, described Kushner’s relationship with Dmitriev as a byproduct of President Trump’s deep-rooted beliefs that he was unfairly punished for beating Hillary Clinton and that the sprawling investigation into his campaign’s Russia contacts was a hoax. Trump distrusted the national security and intelligence communities and saw the officials operating in that apparatus as harboring “Deep State” actors whose goal it was to remove him from office.

The career officials Trump distrusted have nevertheless attempted to do their jobs—which included safeguarding the U.S. from Russian aggression, officials said. As Fiona Hill, Trump’s former top Russia adviser, once put it during her impeachment testimony, officials in her orbit tried to help “with President Trump’s stated goal of improving relations with Russia while still implementing policies meant to deter Russian conduct that threatens the United States, including the unprecedented and successful Russian operation to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.” Most of the time, officials said, it didn’t work. 

“It was a vicious cycle where, even though we were doing a lot of concrete things to take punitive measures against Russia, the president’s own personal behavior and how that was portrayed in the domestic context didn’t allow us to say, ‘We have a coherent Russia policy,’” one former senior official said, referring to later actions the administration took to punish Russia, including expelling diplomats from the country, enacting a slew of sanctions on Russian actors, and pulling out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019.

Four other former senior officials described years of frustration—of trying to push ahead on a Russia strategy only to get sidelined from conversations in the White House because, as the investigations into his campaign ramped up, the president grew more distrustful of the people around him.

Instead Trump relied on his closest allies—often Kushner—to handle the business of government. Trump depended on his son-in-law to go and deliver on the promises he’d made publicly from the outset, including establishing closer ties with Moscow. As Hill and other top officials who worked on Russia began to step away from their jobs—in some cases because they had been forced out of government—Kushner stepped even further into the vacuum. He emerged as one of the most powerful people in the White House, former National Security Adviser John Bolton said in a recent interview with CNN.

The Treasury Department and the State Department did not respond to requests for comment for this story. The White House did not comment on the record. The Russian Direct Investment Fund and Dmitriev also did not respond to requests for comment.

“Jared Kushner has worked closely with our NSC team. Prior to my becoming the National Security Adviser, I worked with Jared on hostage recoveries and his support of the President’s efforts was critical in bringing several of our hostages and detainees home,” National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien said in a statement. “As the NSA, I have seen first-hand how Jared and his office coordinate their work with the NSC and other U.S. Government departments and agencies as he assists President Trump on important foreign and domestic issues.” 

As the U.S. and Russia have struggled to partner on a host of issues—from counterterrorism intelligence sharing to deconfliction of forces in Syria—Kushner and Dmitriev have continued to communicate about alternative ways Moscow and Washington can cooperate. 

“Dmitriev came into the picture because Putin was always saying, ‘Talk to my guy because he can help you with the Gulf and with the Middle East peace plan, we can help stabilize,’” said one former senior administration official. “A lot was going on behind the scenes… they kept it to themselves.”

While those close to Kushner praise the president’s son-in-law’s efforts to find ways to circumvent the bureaucratic process of communicating with Russia and “get things done”—as one individual who has worked with him put it—others have been disturbed by the sidelining of career officials on critical matters of national security. 

Current and former officials tell The Daily Beast the hollowing out of the Russia policy teams across the administration and Trump’s continued lack of trust in that community has left the administration without a cohesive, coordinated approach to handling Moscow. Not only have the two countries failed to reach the rapprochement that Trump so badly wanted, but the U.S. and Russia also are now engaged in an active dispute over Moscow’s use of anti-satellite missiles, its attempts to hack into the networks of U.S. coronavirus vaccine-makers, and its efforts to meddle in the 2020 presidential election.

“It’s as bad as it’s ever been,” one former senior national security official said in describing the administration’s relationship with Russia.

Seychelles Rendezvous

After the 2016 election, President Putin himself tasked Dmitriev directly with trying to make inroads with Trump’s transition team, according to a recent report issued by the Senate Intelligence Committee and Robert Mueller’s special counsel report. Dmitriev got to work, actively trying to connect with members of Trump’s inner circle who would eventually wield influence in a new administration. He was particularly interested in connecting with Kushner, those reports said.

Dmitriev began his outreach to Kushner by connecting with George Nader, a Lebanese-American politico close to the Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Zayed in the United Arab Emirates who helped broker meetings with the incoming Trump administration. Dmitriev’s fund, RDIF, had co-invested with the Emirati sovereign wealth fund on a series of projects and the two men had been in frequent contact. Dmitriev invited Nader to a chess tournament and asked him to invite Kushner, though Nader never passed on the message, the reports said. Over the next several weeks, Dmitriev continued to speak with Nader about the possibility of meeting transition officials like Kushner and Donald Trump Jr. (Nader was later sentenced on child pornography charges in the Eastern District of Virginia).

Dmitriev also reached out to Rick Gerson, who ran a New York hedge fund and was a close friend of Kushner’s. According to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, “Dmitriev told Gerson that Putin had tasked him with developing a reconciliation plan for United States-Russia relations.” Dmitriev’s team previously pushed back on his connection with Putin in a series of articles The Daily Beast published in 2018. 

Gerson told Dmitriev that he would find the right people to talk to about the plan. In the following days, the pair drafted bullet points for the plan and Dmitriev communicated that he had shared the document with Putin.

Days later, Dmitriev flew to the remote archipelago of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. Executives from across the world had gathered on the island to meet with the crown prince. Several of them stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in villas overlooking the water. One of those individuals was Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, who was close with White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and throughout the campaign had tried to connect to Trump’s circle.

Prince met with Dmitriev, who was there with his wife, twice while on the island. Prince later told congressional investigators that he’d run into Dmitriev by chance and spoke with the Russian fund manager over a beer. But Prince was made aware of Dmitriev’s planned trip to the island through Nader, who sent Prince Dmitriev’s bio ahead of time, according to the Mueller report.

Dmitriev and Prince discussed opportunities to improve the U.S.-Russia bilateral relationship under the incoming Trump administration and the bullet points that Gerson had helped draft. Nader was also present. The Daily Beast previously obtained the reconciliation plan Dmitriev had worked on with Gerson and which Dmitriev sent to Gerson for final approval Jan. 17—five days after his meeting in the Seychelles with Prince.  In his congressional testimony in November 2017, Prince said he told Dmitriev that “if Franklin Roosevelt can work with Joseph Stalin after the Ukraine terror famine, after killing tens of millions of his own citizens, we can certainly at least cooperate with the Russians in a productive way to defeat the Islamic State.”

The reconciliation plan called for, among other things, improvement of U.S.-Russian relations over a one-year period, which included building a pathway for the countries to develop “win-win economic investment initiatives.” It noted that Russian companies would “make investments with RDIF financing to serve the U.S. market in the Midwest, creating real jobs for hard hit areas with high employment.”

The next day, Gerson went to see Kushner at the White House to brief him on Dmitriev and hand him the reconciliation plan. Kushner told the Senate Intelligence Committee during an interview that he gave a copy of that plan to Bannon and incoming Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, according to a recent committee report.

In the weeks leading up to Trump’s inauguration, senior officials in the White House who worked alongside the transition team said it became clear that Trump’s inner circle, including Kushner, were going to bypass career officials to make critical national security decisions. In the early days of his administration, Trump didn’t meet with the national security team on Russia policy. 

“We were still coming to terms with the aggressiveness with which [the Russians] attacked our electorate process. The whole kit and caboodle—the leaks, the information campaign, the social media initiatives. The new administration just seemed to ignore that,” that same official said. “There was a general feeling that we could accommodate the Russians in some way.”

Wild ideas flew—withdrawing U.S. troops from the Baltics just to please Putin, cooperating with the Russian military to such an extent it would have broken the law. One former official said there were “whispers” of the Trump team attempting to roll back sanctions on Russia for the election attack and for its invasion of Ukraine. “Their thought was... if we scale back sanctions we can work with them in the Middle East. That was just stupid because the Russians had already offered and asked to work with us,” the official said. “Our idea was: Don’t give up the shit that’s free.”

Ships in the Saudi Night

Two individuals familiar with the matter said Trump was briefed on the Dmitriev U.S.-Russia reconciliation plan ahead of his first call with Putin on Jan. 28, 2017. A White House readout of the call said Trump and Putin spoke for about an hour on subjects ranging from mutual cooperation in defeating ISIS to creating investment opportunities for both countries—two bullet points included in that reconciliation memo.

During the same time period, Kushner was beginning to lay the groundwork for the development of a Middle East peace plan—one Team Trump thought could evolve with considerable international buy-in, including from Russia. The idea for a peace plan had been in the works before Trump took into office, officials said. At an event before his inauguration, Trump spoke with reporters from the Times of Londonabout the idea, saying Kushner would lead the peace plan process.  

Meanwhile, stories began to leak to the press that Trump’s inner circle had worked for weeks behind the scenes to backchannel with Russian officials. In February, The Washington Post reported a series of stories saying National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had spoken with Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergei Kislyak about sanctions and lied to the FBI about it. In February 2017, Flynn was pushed out of his national security job after the news broke that he’d lied to the feds. Before long, talk of rolling back sanctions began to recede.

Russian business executives, lawyers, and lobbyists—including some of those connected to RDIF—tried to ease the financial burden by promoting opportunities for American businesses in Russia. RDIF was beginning to develop major partnerships with sovereign wealth funds and other large financial hubs, co-investing in large projects related to oil, transportation, technology, and medicine. The hope was that the Trump administration could help promote business relations between the two countries. One former senior official said Putin had tapped Dmitriev specifically to try to work with American companies.

Jon Huntsman, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, held business roundtables at the embassy, in an effort to help push forward conversations about creating business opportunities for American companies in Moscow with the help of RDIF.

Dmitriev looked to California, where RDIF already had an investment in Los Angeles-based technology company Virgin Hyperloop One, headed by British businessman Sir Richard Branson.

In Washington, Hill moved into her position as the National Security Council’s top Russia hand in April 2017. Slowly, officials under the new national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, fleshed out a concrete Russia strategy for the administration.

“We had a brief moment after Flynn had been retired —a window under McMaster—to put together a Russia policy,” one senior former official said.

The document called for closer cooperation on fighting ISIS in Syria while ramping up deconfliction efforts in the country, working toward a non-aggression pact in cyberspace, and laying out a roadmap for a dialogue on arms control. But it did little to provide focus to the administration’s approach to handling Moscow, officials said, because the national security, diplomatic, and intelligence communities were often ostracized from conversations with Trump’s inner circle. As officials in those communities took steps to try and hold Russia accountable for meddling in domestic politics, they found themselves held back from making progress because the president publicly sided with Putin. 

Meanwhile, Kushner was quickly becoming Trump’s go-to on all things foreign policy, tapped not only for the Middle East Peace plan but also for engaging with Middle Eastern leaders, including Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Zayed in the UAE and Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia. 

I’d always worried that he’d go and say something that he shouldn’t and that it would blow up in all our faces.

National security and intelligence officials worried about Kushner’s interactions with world leaders, and not only because he lacked government experience and had not been briefed on critical national security matters. Officials said they were also concerned about how his former business ties played into his communications with certain individuals. 

“I’d always worried that he’d go and say something that he shouldn’t and that it would blow up in all our faces,” one former senior official said.

In October 2017, Kushner, who had settled into his role as one of the interlocutors of meetings with foreign officials, took an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia. Then-Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt, who traveled with Kushner to Riyadh, would become one of the plan’s key designers. Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell also joined. The Kremlin—and specifically Dmitriev—was seen as having a significant role to play. The White House did not give details of who Kushner met with while in Riyadh. 

During that same week, the kingdom hosted the Future Investment Initiative—a conference that Branson and Dmitriev both attended. Dmitriev told reporters there that he would invest “billions” in NEOM, a high-tech, futuristic project led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in the northwestern part of the country. Several individuals who attended the conference said Kushner met with individuals on the sidelines of the summit, though they could not remember if the president’s son-in-law spoke with Dmitriev in a sit-down setting. One senior official said Kushner and Dmitriev did not meet at the conference.

That same month, Dmitriev announced that RDIF pledged to invest again, this time with the Chinese Investment Corporation—China’s sovereign wealth fund—in Branson’s Hyperloop.

“There were questions being asked about where Russia might want to spend its money. Dmitriev was the money guy and held the strings,” one former U.S. senior official said. “And the idea on Russia’s part was, ‘We can sell to Jared and everyone else on Middle East peace.’”

IRL Encounter

The details of Kushner’s conversations with foreign officials about the peace plan and other areas for business opportunities for the U.S. remained closely held throughout the next two years. 

As the president’s son-in-law continued to use his personal relationships with foreign leaders to advance the White House and President Trump’s goals, the administration’s Russia policy fell into disarray, as career officials struggled to balance the national security interests of the country with the reality that Trump did not want to address Russia’s interference head on. Officials said that tension grew increasingly worse as Congress demanded the administration punish Russia for its actions. 

In January 2018, Congress, which was working on implementing the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, asked the Treasury Department to provide a list of oligarchs with links to Putin. One of those individuals was Oleg Deripaska, the owner of one of the world’s largest aluminum companies, and former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort’s one-time paymaster. The decision to add Deripaska to the list for Congress was “fast and not thoroughly researched,” as one former senior administration official put it. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control sanctioned Deripaska and two companies in which he held stakes, including aluminum giant Rusal and EN+, an energy and metals company. The listings would later cause a massive uproar on Capitol Hill and among European leaders who relied on Rusal for products such as aircraft.

The chaos didn’t stop there. In the fall of 2017 and winter of 2018, the U.S. State Department and Pentagon had engaged in conversations about whether to send Ukraine Javelins—anti tank weapons—and whether the U.S. would provide those weapons through federal funding.

“The Secretary [Tillerson] went in to see the president and whether or not we should be doing this—giving Ukraine the Javelins. And the president’s reaction was, ‘Are you out of your fucking mind? Why are we giving them anything?” one former senior official told The Daily Beast. “His whole attitude was [the sale] would hurt the Russians. I wondered at that time what it was about the Ukrainians that particularly irritated him. Of course, we later found out.” Tillerson was fired in March 2018.

He really wanted to get on track with Putin and we kept having to react.

Later that month, Trump ignored the advice of his national security team, choosing on a phone call with Putin to congratulate him—instead of condemning him for Moscow’s election interference or its alleged nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil. Trump even floated the idea that Putin visit the White House.

“He really wanted to get on track with Putin and we kept having to react,” one former senior official said. President Trump fired McMaster just a few days later, replacing him with Bolton. 

Officials said various Cabinet officials, including new Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, and Bolton, had varying ideas on how to approach the “Russia problem,” as one former senior official put it. 

Not long after, Trump went to Helsinki for a summit to discuss bilateral relations with Putin. The meeting became instantly infamous when Trump publicly rebuked the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment that Russia had interfered in the previous election. 

Bolton found it curious for another reason. “What both of them [Putin and Trump] really wanted to discuss was increasing U.S. trade and investment in Russia, a conversation that lasted a surprisingly long time given there was so little to say, with so few U.S. businesses really eager to dive into the Russian political and economic morass,” Bolton wrote in his book. It was a point Dmitriev and Kushner had been trying to get across for a long time.

Meanwhile, back in Washington, senior U.S. officials attempted to engage in intelligence sharing with Russia, including information on terrorist financing. But when the U.S. shared intelligence with Moscow, it was rarely reciprocated—and when it was, the information was unhelpful, officials said. 

“Moscow took a lot of license to really push our boundaries and our buttons very harshly,” as one senior official described it. 

Things were only made worse for national security officials when, under pressure from allies, the Treasury Department was forced to walk back its previous sanctions designations on Deripaska and Rusal in December 2018.

Officials said when Congress asked for the names of oligarchs earlier that year, the Treasury Department panicked. It didn’t want to be seen as soft on Russia, and it didn’t want to piss off the White House. So the department made a quick decision. One former senior official said the department drafted the list with such speed that it had not had the chance to fully understand what sanctioning Rusal would do to the world’s aluminum industry. And, that official said, the department hadn’t “unpacked the Rusal ownership structure.” When the Trump administration announced the sanctions, global metal prices skyrocketed.

“At the time we had to get that list out, Mnuchin thought he had to do something demonstrative that we were going to punish Russia for election meddling,” one former senior official said. “You had all of the Europeans asking us to delist and for understandable reasons. So, we went through a painful process of trying to force Deripaska out of Rusal so we could delist Rusal.”

Tensions between the national security community and the White House persisted. Kushner carried out negotiations on his peace plan and included Dmitriev in those talks. The contents of those conversations stayed within Kushner’s circle. One individual familiar with the matter said Kushner met Dmitriev in person “for the first time” in May 2019, though this official close to the president’s son-in-law refused to say where the meeting took place. The official said Huntsman, then the U.S. ambassador in Moscow, introduced the two. During this same time period, Kushner spoke publicly about the Middle East peace plan process and appeared at a Washington think tank’s annual dinner for a panel about his work on the issue.

Two months later, in June 2019, Kushner and his team flew to Manama, Bahrain, to attend a summit for a series of meetings on how to implement one of the major aspects of his plan—investing in Palestine. Hundreds of foreign dignitaries, and investors from across the globe, including Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, attended the lavish event at Manama’s Ritz-Carlton. They gathered in ballrooms for panels and speeches. Kushner gave a presentation on investing in the Palestinian territories. Dmitriev attended. An official with knowledge said Kushner and Dmitriev “crossed paths” at the conference but did not offer more details about their interaction.

No one ever really knew what Jared was up to.

That summit spurred additional conversations in Bahrain and afterward among Kushner’s peace plan team, Dmitrev, and a host of other financiers and banking executives on how best to bring about investments in the Palestinian territories. But the details of those conversations remained closely held within Kushner’s inner circle. 

“No one ever really knew what Jared was up to,” one former official said. 

Another former senior official said they heard bits and pieces of the Kushner peace plan—and word of Russia’s involvement in helping craft portions of it—but that officials in the State Department and National Security Council were primarily kept in the dark. 

“There were maybe three or four people who really knew what Jared was up to and who he was speaking with and what was included in the plan,” that official said. “But they didn’t dish to anyone. And sometimes even people working with Jared didn’t know exactly who or how he was communicating with foreign officials.”

On Aug. 14, Kushner, along with President Trump, announced a deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates that marked a significant step in establishing peace in the Middle East. Kushner was the lead negotiator on the deal, in which Israel and the UAE, among other things, signed on to establishing embassies, increasing trade, and partnering on the fight against the coronavirus. Under the agreement, Israel also promised to temporarily suspend annexation of the West Bank. 

Multiple senior officials said they expect the president’s son-in-law in the next several weeks to deliver similar agreements between Israel and other Arab nations. Kushner is in conversations with several countries about those deals, including Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and Bahrain, those officials said.

Why Can’t We Be Friends?

Kushner wasn’t Trump’s only agent of behind the scenes diplomacy. Former U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland, along with Trump’s personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, worked to deliver messages to Ukraine that officials there should announce investigations into Joe Biden and his son Hunter. In December 2019 the Senate officially launched an impeachment trial into whether the president had withheld military aid to Ukraine in exchange for President Volodymyr Zelensky announcing an investigation into the Bidens and the allegations that a Ukrainian company had interfered in the 2016 election. 

Trump was acquitted of a charge of abuse of power with a 58-42 vote and of a charge of obstruction of justice by a vote of 53-47. By that time, key Russia experts, including Hill and Tim Morrison, who took her place on the council, had left the administration. 

“It all slowly unraveled and by the end we felt like we didn’t have a Russia policy at all,” one former senior official said. 

Now, in the lead-up to the November election, the Trump team is focusing on trying to create a situation through which the U.S. and Russia could work together on arms control. But officials are not optimistic about the chances of brokering any kind of serious negotiations. Not at a time when Moscow is batting off allegations that it paid bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan—and is actively interfering in the 2020 campaign.

Dmitriev, meanwhile, has continued to try and work with U.S. officials on creating a business council where the U.S. and Russia could look for mutually beneficial investment opportunities. In January 2020, Dmitriev went to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, to push the message.  

“I think business cooperation between Russia and the U.S. is important. It’s non-existent right now,” Dmitriev said, adding that he believed sanctions are “wrong… Particularly U.S. sanctions, because they really undermine the U.S. long term.” 

Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, and Secretary Mnuchin were at Davos as well, leading the American delegation. 

This spring, a few days after that Russian plane loaded with protective gear landed in New York City—the shipment made possible in part by Kushner’s “Project Airbridge”—Saudi Arabia and Russia struck a deal to cut oil production in order to stabilize the market that had been rattled by the coronavirus. OPEC and its allies agreed to cut production by 9.7 million barrels a day in May and June after oil prices fell to 18-year lows. One senior administration official said Kushner and Dmitriev worked behind the scenes to help negotiate the deal.

During the last-minute negotiations, Dmitriev published an op-ed with CNBC saying the U.S. and Russia should work together to defeat the coronavirus.

“During World War II, American and Russian soldiers fought side by side against a common enemy,” Dmitriev wrote. “Just as our grandfathers stood shoulder to shoulder... now our countries must show unity and leadership to win the war against the coronavirus.” 

Dmitriev’s article was viewed in the administration as the most recent proposal by the Russians to work with the United States. He often appears on television and publishes opinion articles in CNBC and other American media outlets proposing new pathways for cooperation between the U.S. and Russia. He also pitches ideas publicly at international forums, including in Davos. Dmitriev’s plan for cooperation on the virus seemed to those working on the Russia portfolio like a way the two countries could legitimately partner on a major international crisis. 

In May, a U.S. Air Force aircraft landed in Moscow. Officials with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) carried out the delivery of a $5.6 billion shipment with ventilators meant to help Russia fight the virus—even though USAID ceased operations in the country in 2012. The agency did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

In its communiqué, the U.S. State Department used language similar to Dmitriev’s: “Particularly in times of crisis, we must work together—much like we did during the Second World War, when the people of our two nations and other allies fought valiantly, suffered great losses, and endured great hardship.”

Two months after that, the U.S. and United Kingdom intelligence communities accused hackers working for the Kremlin of breaking into the networks of groups working on a COVID-19 vaccine.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn't make this up:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

You don't say...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, Ivanka doesn't keep promises. What a shocker. /sarcasm

"Ivanka Trump shared a video of her meeting a homeless D.C. woman. That woman says she’s still waiting for her to keep a promise."

Spoiler

When Kiesha Davis first read what Ivanka Trump wrote about her on Twitter, what struck her most was this:

The president’s daughter spelled her name right.

“I was just beaming,” Davis recalls of that moment.

The 41-year-old hadn’t used the social media platform before that day, but seeing her name on it, with that “i” placed properly before that “e,” left her feeling hopeful. It left her feeling as if Trump had really seen her when they met briefly on July 20 at the DC Dream Center.

The first daughter and White House adviser was there that day to distribute food from the Agriculture Department’s Farmers to Families Food Box Program.

Davis was there as a volunteer and as a city resident who could use the free groceries.

“It was great to meet you Kiesha!” Trump tweeted that day, sharing a 29-second video of Davis talking to her.

In it, Davis describes the situation she and her 76-year-old mother have been living in for more than a year, and she expresses gratitude for what she is seeing happening around her at that moment.

“My mother and I, we’ve been homeless,” she says. “We’ve been sleeping out of a vehicle. But I’m a community advocate, and so, yes, it has been depressing and debilitating, but I’m so grateful and thankful for Ivanka, coming here with everyone today to partner with DC Dream Center. That has been awesome to get food out into the community. They’ve allowed me to come and pick up food to be able to deliver to people that are shut in, that are needy, that are homeless and disabled, you name it.”

Since it was published, the video has drawn more than 178,000 views and thousands of likes, retweets and comments.

Some people who saw it praised Trump: “Thank you @IvankaTrump for all that you do for our country.”

Others who clicked on it questioned whether Davis was paid to make that statement or described her as unknowingly used as a political prop: “This is too sad to watch. She doesn’t see that Ivanka only used her for a photo op.”

Davis read through all those comments and, at first, dismissed them. Those who know her well describe her as an optimist, as someone who spends her days trying to lift up people around her and remains buoyant despite carrying a weight of worries that would drown others.

As Davis tells it, she didn’t see the encounter with Trump as having anything to do with politics. She saw it as a “genuine” interaction. But now, more than a month later, she’s not sure what to make of it.

Now, when she thinks about that tweet and that video, what strikes her most is not what they show but what they don’t.

On Thursday, Trump is expected to address the nation on her father’s behalf at the Republican National Convention. But Davis says she is still waiting to hear from her. On the day they met, she says, Trump promised to follow up with her, and she believed that she would.

Then one week passed, followed by another. Davis says she had asked a woman who was with Trump for her contact information, but when she tried calling the number that was written down, it wasn’t working.

“There was hope in the moment, and then after that, it was like, ‘Okay, I’ve been through this before,’ ” Davis says. “I’m used to people blowing me off.”

It’s the presidential election season, which means it’s that time when we get to see politicians interacting more with regular folk — people who work and live in situations they don’t and may never experience. This is true across party lines and will take place even if coronavirus concerns mean that instead of kissing babies and shaking hands, connections are made through masks.

But what happened to Davis offers a lesson on what they shouldn’t do: People who wield political power shouldn’t put vulnerable people on public display without offering ways to improve their situations.

I know Davis. Before her encounter with Trump, I had interviewed her for a different column after learning about her volunteer work in Southeast Washington. At the time, Davis told me how she and her mother, Annie Davis, had been wrongfully evicted for standing up to their landlord and how she was worried her mother would die before they could find stable housing.

When we speak again on a recent afternoon, her voice starts to shake. She explains that she no longer has the car she was borrowing from a relative and that she is considering renting one — using money people donated through a GoFundMe page — for her mom and her to live in temporarily. She says that feels safer than going to a shelter during a pandemic, because her mom has health conditions that make her vulnerable to the virus.

“I don’t want to cry,” she says, “but I get so irritated. Emotionally, I’m just drained because I worry about my mom more than anything. If it was just me, I would be okay. But I just get so mad, because how did this happen? How did this even happen? What more can I be doing?”

She talks about holding jobs with the airport authority and the Postal Service but says she had to stop working to take care of her mom. She now serves on the board of directors for the Douglass Community Land Trust and volunteers with several organizations, including Bread for the City.

The names of both organizations were on her name tag when she met Trump.

Christie Gardner, who serves as the secretary for Bread for the City, says she was with Davis that day. She says that Trump seemed to hear Davis and absorb what she was saying but that then as the weeks passed, it became clear what was going to come of it. “Nothing, zilch,” she says.

“Since that happened, it’s kind of broken her,” Gardner says. “You can hear it in her voice. She’s just not the same.”

Gardner says she and Davis have known each other for nearly two decades and have gone into neighborhoods together, by car and by bus, to deliver food to those who need it. On a recent evening, she says, they went to help a mother at 11 p.m. after she called worried because she and her children had been moved into an apartment that was filled with mold.

Ginger Rumph, the executive director of the Douglass Community Land Trust, says every time she calls Davis to check on her, she ends up hearing about other people who are in need. She describes Davis as constantly trying to connect people who can help one another.

Rumph describes the silence that followed Trump’s encounter with Davis as “damaging” to her. When Davis first saw Trump’s tweet, she sent it to Rumph, and Rumph says she took some time before responding.

“She was excited and optimistic and hopeful, and I didn’t want to say anything to take that feeling away,” she says. “But my inclination was to think that perhaps what she was hoping it would yield, it wasn’t going to yield. This has happened to her so many times from so many different people.”

Davis describes turning to lawmakers across political parties for help and always ending up in the same place — waiting. Normally, though, that wait doesn’t come while strangers make public comments about her. Ivanka Trump has more than 9.3 million Twitter followers.

After this column initially published online, White House communications director Alyssa Farah sent this statement about Ivanka Trump’s encounter with Davis: “Ivanka greatly enjoyed the conversation she had with Kiesha on her recent trip spotlighting the Trump Administration’s Farmer’s to Families Food Box Program, so much so that she shared her office’s contact information to keep in touch. Her office has not received any outreach yet but looks forward to reconnecting. We would be honored to host Kiesha for a meeting at the White House and look forward to scheduling a connection soon. We would have been happy to share this with the Washington Post before the [sic] wrote an entire story, had they reached out to the White House for comment prior to publishing.”

As you can see, it takes no responsibility for what happened. It instead puts the responsibility on Davis to call, which she says she tried to do, using a number that was written by hand. She only later realized no one asked for her contact information. I have since agreed, with her consent, to pass on her number to White House staff members.

But before Davis learned that she might soon have a chance to talk to Trump again, she considered what she might tell her. She decided she wanted Trump to know this: “We’re still out in the street. We’re still homeless.”

Davis also offered advice to her or anyone with political power who will want to connect with people experiencing hardships in the months leading up to the election.

“Hear people,” she said. “See. Hear. And do something to help people, not only in this city but throughout the country. And not just for their votes. Not just to say, ‘We talked to a person,’ and that’s it. Actually do something. Do something to make positive change.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Exactly -- Ivanka and Jared are huge snobs.

[fraurosena]

Hmmm. I wonder if he realises that by admitting he has tapes (of everything, no less) he has  admitted their existence, and they can now be subpoenaed?

 

Edited September 15, 2020 by fraurosena
English is my goodest subject...

[GreyhoundFan]

I agree. I hope he doesn't do well in jail.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Lock her up:

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Trump suggested naming his daughter Ivanka as his running mate in 2016, according to new book by Rick Gates"

Spoiler

As Donald Trump’s top campaign aides began a discussion in June 2016 about who the presumptive Republican presidential nominee should select as his running mate, the candidate piped up with an idea.

“I think it should be Ivanka. What about Ivanka as my VP?” Trump asked the assembled group, according to a new book by his former deputy campaign manager Rick Gates set to be published Oct. 13.

Trump added: “She’s bright, she’s smart, she’s beautiful, and the people would love her!”

In Gates’s telling, Trump’s suggestion of naming to the ticket his then-34-year-old daughter — a fashion and real estate executive who had never held elected office — was no passing fancy.

Instead, he brought up the idea repeatedly over the following weeks, trying to sell his campaign staff on the idea, insisting she would be embraced by the Republican base, Gates writes.

Trump was so taken with the concept of his eldest daughter as his vice president — and so cool to other options, including his eventual selection, then-Indiana Gov. Mike Pence — that his team polled the idea twice, according to Gates.

It was Ivanka Trump who finally ended the conversation, Gates writes, going to her father to tell him it wasn’t a good idea. Trump eventually came around and selected Pence, after the governor won him over by delivering a “vicious and extended monologue” about Bill and Hillary Clinton at a get-to-know-you breakfast later that summer, according to Gates’s account.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an interview last week, Gates said he is not certain Trump would actually have gone through with making his daughter his running mate.

But he said he included the anecdote in his new book, first reported by Bloomberg, as a prime example of the kind of unconventional thinking he believes made Trump an appealing candidate.

While others might see the episode as a distasteful symbol of Trump’s nepotism, Gates said it shows Trump’s commitment to family, loyalty and ensuring those around him support his agenda and not their own — “the values and assets that Trump cared most about,” he said.

The account in Gates’s book — “Wicked Game: An Insider’s Story on How Trump Won, Mueller Failed, and America Lost” — is one of several that he cites in praise of his former boss as he describes working on the campaign and ultimately becoming ensnared in the special counsel investigation that consumed much of Trump’s presidency. Unlike a number of other memoirs by former Trump staffers, Gates’s book serves not as a tell-all, but rather a defense of the president and how he and others helped elect him.

In an interview, Gates said he believes Trump has been a good president — “the most decisive president we’ve had probably since Eisenhower” — and says he supports his reelection.

After working on the 2016 campaign and helping organize the inauguration, Gates pleaded guilty in February 2018 to conspiracy against the United States and lying to federal investigators in relation to lobbying work he and former campaign chairman Paul Manafort had done in Ukraine before joining Trump’s team.

After entering his plea, he became one of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s most important cooperating witnesses, spending hundreds of hours in interviews for multiple investigations and testifying at trial against both his longtime former boss, Manafort, and former Trump confidante Roger Stone.

He was sentenced to spend 45 days in prison, along with three years probation, but allowed to serve only on weekends. His prison term was suspended in April due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Like Trump, Gates argues the Mueller investigation was illegitimate and unfair, saying overzealous prosecutors targeted lower-level aides like him in a misguided effort to flip them against a president about whom they had no damaging information to share.

Earlier this year, Trump commuted the sentence of Stone after a jury found him guilty of lying to Congress and obstructing justice.

Gates said he would “absolutely” take a pardon if Trump offered him one.

“I mean, who wouldn’t?” he said in an interview, adding: “We have not made any overture. . . . But if I were looking at this objectively, I would say that this started with political intention and that people were caught up in the inquiry in ways that they wouldn’t have been if the inquiry had been done more properly.”

He said he laments that “lives were damaged” in the course of the inquiry. “One of the things I think people lost focus on, again, on both sides is that we’re all human beings. It got so politically toxic, it’s almost as if both sides were not looking at the others involved as human beings, but instead just as political pawns that they could leverage.”

In the interview, Gates generally defended the work of Manafort, his longtime colleague, whose openness to Russian overtures was described in a recent Senate Intelligence Committee report as a risk to U.S. national security.

“I never heard any issues raised about him being a grave security concern,” Gates said. “It strikes me as very politically motivated and politically targeted.”

While the Trump who emerges from Gates’s book has a short temper and a shorter attention span, Gates largely argues such traits are positives — attributes of an unorthodox politician, he says.

He writes that Trump wished to ban politicians from speaking at his 2016 convention, including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, whom he had vanquished for the GOP nomination. Instead, he proposed inviting celebrities such as tennis star Serena Williams, basketball legend LeBron James and boxing promoter Don King to speak.

And he notes in his book another moment in the campaign that he believes resonated with some voters, even if it horrified the political class: the answer Trump gave in the final debate of 2016 when asked if he would accept the election results.

“I’ll keep you in suspense, okay?” Trump told moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News. He has echoed that response in similar statements this year, refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses in November.

At the time, Gates suggests the campaign did not dwell on whether the answer was undemocratic or problematic, but on their view that it was effective.

While the Washington establishment thought Trump’s answer was terrible, Gates writes, the campaign viewed it differently: as a statement that would appeal to voters who appreciated “Trump’s breaking with protocol, his ‘fearlessness’ when it came to challenging the status quo.”

 

[Vivi_music]

God... I don't hate a lot of people. But I hate them.

Leeches. LEECHES they are. Trump and his kids bring nothing to humanity. Nothing to help us get better as a species. They only bring chaos and take advantage of people.

[Audrey2]

6 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

In an interview last week, Gates said he is not certain Trump would actually have gone through with making his daughter his running mate.

I disagree. Trump says things that sound outlandish, and people think he's joking. Trump doesn't joke. He says exactly what he plans to do.

[Vivi_music]

3 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

I disagree. Trump says things that sound outlandish, and people think he's joking. Trump doesn't joke. He says exactly what he plans to do.

I agree. Trump is incapable of humour. He never jokes nor kid.

[GreyhoundFan]

Treason Barbie leading the association of dim bulbs:

 

[onekidanddone]

26 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Treason Barbie leading the association of dim bulbs:

 

Why do they all look alike? Gotta hold up the Aryan example

[GreyhoundFan]

Gee, Treason Ken is corrupt. What a shocker. /sarcasm

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Treason Barbie needs to just go away. Preferably for 10 to 20 years in a NY state facility where she can model jumpsuits.

More great responses:

Spoiler

 

 

Edited October 4, 2020 by GreyhoundFan

[GreyhoundFan]

[fraurosena]

It's like they simply decide to say the exact opposite of what is true. BT's believe anything coming out of their mouths anyway, so...