Ivanka and Jared 3: Treason Barbie and Ken

[Howl]

I haven't seen anyone reference the arrest of Tom Barrak, but it's a huge deal, a really big deal, the biggest.  He's BFF with Trump.   He was arrested and jailed earlier this week and will have a bail hearing on Monday.  My guess? He's not going anywhere.  He's no longer a billionaire, but has a private jet, big boat, speaks fluent Arabic and is mega connected to leaders in more than one Middle Eastern Country (Saudi Arabia, UAE for starters). 

Why am I posting this on the Jarvanka thread? Because Kushner was up to HERE in the Middle East, massaging this and that event to eventually get bailed out on the 666 5th Ave. financial albatross.  Some have speculated that Jared engineered the blockade of Qatar as a way to apply pressure for the Qatari sovereign wealth fund to bail him out of 666 Fifth Ave. 

Jared is probably mainlining Valium between bouts of shitting bricks;  there's a lot of legal exposure lurking.  Jared is a criminal, pure and simple and I hope the Feds have the cajones to put him away. 

My thinking is that if Barrak flips, Jared's crime-ing will be exposed big time.  The judge would be insane to release Barrak, who makes Ghislaine Maxwell's flight risk look minor, and a Barrak sitting in jail will not be a happy almost Billionaire.  He'll be hating jail and contemplating what prison will look like. 

OK, so now let's do Ivanka.  Barrak was chair of the Trump Inaugural Committee, the one that appears to be riddled with fraud and missing money and is currently being investigated.  I think Ivanka is being investigated relative to the inauguration; don't have the current details, but she was in the middle of it. 

From Mother Jones: Top Trump Adviser Arrested and Charged With Secretly Lobbying for the UAE   Tom Barrack, head of Trump’s inaugural committee, is accused of obstructing justice and lying to the feds.

To clarify, Barrak's arrest is for the United Arab Emirates issue, and not related to the inauguration. 

Side note: While we're going on about the Middle East, someone on Twitter (Louis Mensch?) claims that Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated because he'd uncovered a Saudi plot to foment a coup in Qatar.  Have not seen that speculation elsewhere. 

Edited July 22, 2021 by Howl

[fraurosena]

19 hours ago, Howl said:

I haven't seen anyone reference the arrest of Tom Barrak, but it's a huge deal, a really big deal, the biggest.  He's BFF with Trump.   He was arrested and jailed earlier this week and will have a bail hearing on Monday.  My guess? He's not going anywhere.  He's no longer a billionaire, but has a private jet, big boat, speaks fluent Arabic and is mega connected to leaders in more than one Middle Eastern Country (Saudi Arabia, UAE for starters). 

Why am I posting this on the Jarvanka thread? Because Kushner was up to HERE in the Middle East, massaging this and that event to eventually get bailed out on the 666 5th Ave. financial albatross.  Some have speculated that Jared engineered the blockade of Qatar as a way to apply pressure for the Qatari sovereign wealth fund to bail him out of 666 Fifth Ave. 

Jared is probably mainlining Valium between bouts of shitting bricks;  there's a lot of legal exposure lurking.  Jared is a criminal, pure and simple and I hope the Feds have the cajones to put him away. 

My thinking is that if Barrak flips, Jared's crime-ing will be exposed big time.  The judge would be insane to release Barrak, who makes Ghislaine Maxwell's flight risk look minor, and a Barrak sitting in jail will not be a happy almost Billionaire.  He'll be hating jail and contemplating what prison will look like. 

OK, so now let's do Ivanka.  Barrak was chair of the Trump Inaugural Committee, the one that appears to be riddled with fraud and missing money and is currently being investigated.  I think Ivanka is being investigated relative to the inauguration; don't have the current details, but she was in the middle of it. 

From Mother Jones: Top Trump Adviser Arrested and Charged With Secretly Lobbying for the UAE   Tom Barrack, head of Trump’s inaugural committee, is accused of obstructing justice and lying to the feds.

To clarify, Barrak's arrest is for the United Arab Emirates issue, and not related to the inauguration. 

Side note: While we're going on about the Middle East, someone on Twitter (Louis Mensch?) claims that Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated because he'd uncovered a Saudi plot to foment a coup in Qatar.  Have not seen that speculation elsewhere. 

I posted about this earlier in the week in the Trump thread, and included a Rachel Maddow piece on his arrest. She succinctly points out that Barrack was not a lobbyist but a spy for the UAE.
But I really like your analysis and especially the visual of Jared shitting bricks. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if he was the (quite witting) linking pin between all the Middle Eastern spies and the Trump administration. 

[Howl]

Well, Tom Barrak got bail.  I'm gobsmacked.  Other than the few days he just spent in jail, I doubt he'll ever see the inside of a cell. 

[fraurosena]

20 minutes ago, Howl said:

Well, Tom Barrak got bail.  I'm gobsmacked.  Other than the few days he just spent in jail, I doubt he'll ever see the inside of a cell. 

Yeah, it seems he bought his way out. 

 

[WiseGirl]

You and me both Aunt Crabby. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

I like this one too:

 

[Howl]

On 7/23/2021 at 10:53 AM, fraurosena said:

It wouldn't surprise me one bit if he was the (quite witting) linking pin between all the Middle Eastern spies and the Trump administration. 

Also, Kushner used What's App to communicate with people like MBS. An Israeli company created a way to hack What's App, so who knows how compromised Kushner is, or maybe with Kushner's Israeli links, he's the one holding the compromising info. 

Anyway, Jared Kushner is starting an investment firm and leaving politics for the foreseeable future

 

[Howl]

Damn, Noel Casler is on a absolute tear today: 

 

[So-Virgin-It-Hurts]

I'm not sure where the best place is to post this, so here goes:

The New York Times posted the best documentary video I've seen in a very long time. It was six months in the making worthwhile to watch to the end.

Every single person who crossed the barrier belongs in GTMO . . .

Spoiler

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/14/insider/video-capitol-riot.html?algo=combo_lda_clicks_norm_20_diversified&block=3&campaign_id=142&emc=edit_fory_20210815&fellback=false&imp_id=146434196&instance_id=38006&nl=for-you&nlid=94306486&rank=5&regi_id=94306486&req_id=829580174&segment_id=66337&surface=for-you-email-discover&user_id=b76da5a30cf517645400888c3c25828f&variant=0_combo_lda_clicks_norm_20_diversified

Sorry, I don't know how to link.

[GreyhoundFan]

Ivanka and Jared were not invited to this year's Met Gala. So Rick Wilson had fun:

 

These two replies made me laugh:

Spoiler

 

[47of74]

No surprise here

Quote

In the book, obtained by The Washington Post, Grisham, who also served as chief of staff and press secretary to Melania Trump, reportedly said that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner fancied themselves as royalty.

Grisham described how the couple in June 2019 tried to muscle their way into a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II that then-President Trump and first lady Melania Trump attended, which would have defied protocol for a state visit, but were prevented from joining because there was no additional space in the helicopter.

"I finally figured out what was going on," Grisham reportedly wrote in the memoir. "Jared and Ivanka thought they were the royal family of the United States."

In the book, Grisham recalls the first lady and White House staff called Ivanka Trump "the Princess," describing how she would often say "my father" in professional work meetings.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This actually is filed under "Dear God" on Vanity Fair's website: "Not a Joke: Trump Was Going to Appoint Ivanka President of the World Bank Until Steven Mnuchin Intervened'

Quote

Back in 2019, as only the patriarch of the world’s most delusional family could, Donald Trump told The Atlantic about all the jobs that he’d wanted to give his daughter Ivanka, ones for which she wasn’t even qualified to do an unpaid internship. Ambassador to the United Nations? Ivanka “would’ve been great,” just “incredible” at the job, Trump explained to reporter Elaina Plott. “I even thought of Ivanka for the World Bank,” he added. “She would’ve been great at that because she’s very good with numbers. She’s got a great calmness...I’ve seen her under tremendous stress and pressure. She reacts very well—that’s usually a genetic thing, but it’s one of those things, nevertheless. She’s got a tremendous presence when she walks into the room.”

At the time these asides just seemed like the typical pronouncements of a guy whose most dominant features are his pathological inability to ever tell the truth and his creepy obsession with his eldest daughter, which, just a few months later, would result in his boldly and insanely claiming she’d created 14 million jobs. But according to a new report, Trump was actually dead serious about naming Ivanka, of the Ivanka Trump clothing line, the president of the World Bank—and had to be stopped from doing so.

Per The Intercept:

In January 2019, Jim Yong Kim threw the global financial development sector into a state of disarray: The former academic and health official announced he would be stepping down the following month from his role as president of the World Bank, opting instead for a cushier gig at a Wall Street private-equity firm. For an institution that was already struggling with heightened competition from China and private capital, Kim’s departure—which came as a total surprise—was seen as a setback, as it handed an opportunity to choose a new leader to President Donald Trump, creating worries that the America First champion would pick somebody ill suited for the global role.

As the White House moved to select its new leader, one name very dear to Trump’s heart kept floating around: his daughter Ivanka Trump. That never came to fruition, though, with Ivanka later telling reporters that though her father had raised the subject, she declined to pursue the position as she was “happy with the work” she was doing as his senior adviser.... But two sources, not authorized to speak publicly, tell The Intercept the talk of Ivanka at the helm went far beyond the realm of Beltway chatter: Trump very much wanted Ivanka as World Bank president, and it was [Treasury Secretary Steven] Mnuchin who actually blocked her ascent to the leadership role.

“It came incredibly close to happening,” said one well-placed source.

Spokespeople for Mnuchin and Ivanka Trump did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment; neither did the World Bank or the Trump Organization. While she, miraculously, did not end up running the place, Ivanka did “aid” Mnuchin and then White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney in selecting Kim’s successor, a job she was equally unqualified to perform.

Prior to her role as White House adviser, Ivanka spent 12 years at the Trump Organization as executive vice president of development and acquisitions. She also launched her own line of fashion products that, according to 2019 financial disclosures, reportedly brought in between $100,000 and $1,000,000 in rent or royalties.

Once in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Ivanka helped launch the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative, colloquially known as the “Ivanka Fund”: a World Bank–supported project to raise money for female entrepreneurs in developing nations. It was her work on the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative that White House spokesperson Jessica Ditto cited in explaining Ivanka’s qualification for selecting the next World Bank leader. “She’s worked closely with the World Bank’s leadership for the past two years,” Ditto said.

But that initiative still left her pretty light on experience. “That’s a very thin base to try to establish credibility in this multilateral institution,” said Scott Morris, director of the U.S. development policy program at the Center for Global Development in D.C. “It’s hard to imagine that she would have been viewed as a credible leader. It would be the worst kind of exercise of U.S. power. I have to think as a candidate she would have encountered some resistance. But maybe [the bank’s members] would not have wanted to provoke the U.S. president.”

As a reminder, other people Ivanka backed for gigs in the administration included Anthony “My Colleague Autofellates” Scaramucci and Hope “Misleading Statements About Russia” Hicks. But her most memorable recommendation was unregistered foreign agent turned guilty-pleading criminal Mike Flynn, whose candidacy she wholeheartedly endorsed during the 2016 transition, praising the retired general’s “amazing loyalty to my father” after inviting Flynn to a transition meeting without telling then coordinator Chris Christie. “General, what job do you want?” Ivanka reportedly asked Flynn at the time. “It was like Princess Ivanka had laid the sword on Flynn’s shoulders and said, ‘Rise and go forth,’” a participant at the meeting told The New Yorker. 

 

[GreyhoundFan]

This is a good read: "Javanka In Exile"

Quote

The beachfront in Surfside, Florida, is one of the more peaceful and unexploited stretches of public sunning space in the entire sprawling South Florida metropolis. Nobody is hawking kitschy T-shirts (advertising and vending are verboten), and you can’t fish on the shore during daylight. Grass-topped sand dunes and sea-grape trees hem the length of the beach and separate it from the town’s semi-famous “hard pack”: a serene one-mile pathway of compressed sand beloved by runners.

One sunny day last June, a Surfside resident spotted a tall blond woman on the hard pack, with a little white dog on a leash. She watched as the woman led the dog off the pathway toward the beach, right past a sign that clearly said dogs weren’t allowed.

The resident, a beach activist who finds high purpose in protecting Surfside’s loggerhead sea turtles during nesting season, mobilized. “I was speed-walking at her and yelling at her,” she recalls. “I just opened my mouth and said, ‘You can’t go out there with the dog!’”

When the startled owner turned around, her face was immediately recognizable. It was Ivanka Trump—accompanied by her ten-year-old daughter, Arabella, and their ultra-white, blue-eyed pooch, Winter.

“Oh-uh, I didn’t realize,” Trump said.

The resident was a bit flummoxed herself; this was her first face-to-face encounter with the former First Daughter. “She’s well put together,” the neighbor remembers. “She’s had a lot of work done, and it’s good plastic. It’s Miami, and there’s a lot of bad plastic here. She has good plastic.”

The women were adjacent to the seaside condo building where Ivanka and Jared, their three children, and Winter (believed to be a Pomeranian mix) had resettled after their inglorious exit from Washington five months earlier—and just steps from the large beach-rules notice that Trump surely must have passed scores of times by then.

“You’re standing right next to the sign,” the neighbor told Ivanka. “Look, it says ‘No dogs.’”

“Oh,” Ivanka said again, retreating.

A few months later, the woman bumped into the family once more—a rare kind of happenstance since the Kushners had sought exile in the Sunshine State.

Ivanka and Jared were out at the ocean’s edge with their five-year-old son, Theodore. He walked up to the neighbor (who asked to remain anonymous because she continues to live near the family) and talked about a fish he’d caught. The neighbor reminded Jared, in swim trunks, and Ivanka, in a “cute ruffled outfit,” to watch out for jellyfish. Ivanka indicated she wouldn’t be swimming, but Theodore hurried into the ocean. The neighbor was immediately concerned.

“I’m thinking, Why is this boy in the water alone on a boogie board with this moderate rip current? I’m a mother, and I would never let my child alone in the water like that.”

Sure enough, young Theodore began drifting from shore, prompting Jared to run in after him.

“Slenderman moves quick,” the neighbor quips.

Her encounters with Ivanka only reinforced a long-held impression: “She seems to be about . . . ‘I live in this little cocoon where the rules don’t apply to me’ . . . in her own little world.”

Ivanka’s world has certainly gotten smaller. She’s out of politics at the moment, out of her former executive job at the Trump Organization, out of the womenswear brand that bore her name, out of high society in New York, and cast out of Washington, too. Although once viewed as a potentially tempering force on her demagogic dad, Ivanka never did find her footing in the White House or in DC society; January 6 was the final rupture. Ivanka reportedly spent hours that day pleading with her father to call off the mob at the Capitol. When she tweeted for an end to the violence herself, she addressed the rioters as “American Patriots,” before admitting that they weren’t patriots at all and deleting the tweet.

Since that traumatic day, Ivanka has largely been silent. Her farewell tweet from the West Wing didn’t mention her father by name, wished Joe Biden success, and urged the nation to find “common ground.” A previously prolific Instagram and Twitter user, she has posted only twice in the year since—both posts commemorated her jabs of the Covid vaccine—and she hasn’t made any public-speaking appearances. While her brothers didn’t have much of a public brand before their ascendance to right-wing demigods, Ivanka’s reputation plummeted in the absolute opposite direction, from haute to hated, fashionista to plain old fascista.

Now the Kushners have sought refuge in Surfside, a town of only 6,000 people that’s hardly immune from Trumpian divisiveness—the former President lost to Joe Biden in the Surfside precinct by 69 votes—yet one that previously managed to stay off most people’s radar. Which was just fine with plenty of residents.

Eliana Salzhauer, a town commissioner, likens her reaction upon hearing Javanka was arriving to a scene in 1980’s The Jerk in which Steve Martin’s absurdist character is ecstatic to find his name listed in the phone book while an unhinged killer picks Martin’s name randomly from the same directory.

“It was, ‘Oh, good, the town is getting recognition,’ ” says Salzhauer, a Democrat. “Then it was, ‘Oh, no, the psychos are coming.’ ”

The last thing Salzhauer wants is to become an enabler of the couple’s reinvention act in South Florida, which makes the whole situation rather frustrating. As she puts it, “What are they doing in our town?”

Surfside is a quaint (by Florida standards) hamlet wedged between Bal Harbour to the north and North Miami Beach to the south—“Miami’s Uptown Beachtown,” as they say, with an uptowny history befitting a couple worth an estimated $800 million. The town was incorporated in 1935, when 35 members of the exclusive Surf Club—a secluded hangout for Frank Sinatra, Ava Gardner, Winston Churchill, and other A-listers—wanted to prevent the land around their club from being annexed by Miami. They pooled $28,500 and established their own little burg, thereafter known as Surfside.

The town is only a mile—eight blocks—long, a sliver of land sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Intercoastal Waterway, with high-rise beach condos on one side and single-family homes on the other. According to the Census Bureau, 54 percent of residents are white, 45 percent are Latino (many of them affluent immigrants from South American countries), and a virtually unheard-of zero percent of the population is Black. The old Surf Club is now a Four Seasons, one block over from the Arte, the spectacular new glass pile where Ivanka and Jared have been living for the past year (and where the rent can come in at $40,000 a month). Designed by an Italian architect and reminiscent of a pyramid, their 12-story building has 16 residences with floor-to-ceiling windows, plus a clutch of in-house amenities that sound perfectly suited for sheltering in place and shaking off the chill of Washington (beachfront meditation pond, anyone?).

Still, Surfside has little of the glitz of Palm Beach and Mar-a-Lago, the former President’s home base, or even the cachet of nearby Jupiter, where Don Jr. and Eric Trump both purchased multimillion-dollar mansions in the spring of 2021. What it does have is a significant Jewish population.

In Washington, Jared, an Orthodox Jew, and Ivanka, who converted after their 2009 wedding, prioritized walking proximity to their synagogue when they chose Kalorama for their home. Post-administration, they picked what may be South Florida’s closest facsimile to a Little Israel. The heart of Surfside’s two-block downtown strip is a collection of kosher restaurants and stores. (One Javanka sighting put them at the since-closed Koshertown grocery.) Town life tends to center around its two synagogues: the more conservative Shul, which bills itself as “one of the most unorthodox, Orthodox synagogues,” and the smaller Orthodox Young Israel—“Judaism to fit modern times,” as one resident describes it. It’s from the latter that the Kushners have been seen walking home from Shabbat services, security guard trailing behind them.

“If you’re looking to escape New Jersey and New York, [Surfside] is where you’re going to end up,” says Salzhauer, the town commissioner. “Once they built the Shul and then Young Israel, it was open season on real estate.” The synagogues serve thousands of congregants from four neighboring communities, but “everybody wants to live within walking distance, if you’re Orthodox, to the temple.”

The Kushner kids attend a private Hebrew school nearby. (And so far, the family has avoided the public drama that chased them out of DC’s Milton Gottesman Jewish Day School, when Ivanka and Jared’s failure to follow Covid safety protocols at work—remember the Amy Coney Barrett swearing-in superspreader?—caused an uproar among fellow parents.)

“This is like a warm version of New York—the same pace, the same driving, the same kind of brusque attitude about things,” says Salzhauer. “It’s the same people, but it’s warmer, so everyone’s a little happier because everybody’s not freezing their asses off and having to dig their cars out of the snow.”

Salzhauer and Jared actually both attended the Frisch School, a yeshiva in Paramus, New Jersey, for high school. (At 40, Jared is 11 years Salzhauer’s junior.) Not that the two have had occasion to trade any glory-days yarns about their alma mater. Javanka aren’t only the town’s most well-known inhabitants—Wonder Woman actress Lynda Carter is a fairly distant third—they’re also among its most invisible.

The couple is rarely seen outside the Arte, and only the occasional paparazzo has published pictures of their doings (jogging on the hard pack, relaxing on a yacht in Biscayne Bay). One of the few times they seemed to be telegraphing more than proof of life was shortly after their former colleague Stephanie Grisham published her tell-all about the Trump White House. Jared and Ivanka—who, Grisham revealed, had been known around Melania Trump’s East Wing as “ ‘the interns’ because they represented in our minds obnoxious, entitled know-it-alls”—showed up at a Miami water park with their children and kissed for the cameras in their matching black bathing suits, as if to say, “I really don’t care, do u?” Later, after a November outing to a Louis Vuitton show in Miami, leftie Twitter exploded and Vanity Fair followed up with a gleeful hate-read headlined JARED AND IVANKA TRY TO REENTER POLITE SOCIETY, ARE PROMPTLY TOLD TO F–K OFF.

Last June, when the Champlain Towers building in Surfside collapsed in the middle of the night and killed 98 people—and TV screens around the world were zooming in on the town—Ivanka and Jared donated to the search effort for victims of the building located two blocks from theirs, according to the local NBC affiliate. But even then, they made no statement. Perhaps they worried their disgraced brand would distract from the incredible tragedy. On the other hand, it might have been an opportunity to suds up their image.

Still, Surfside hasn’t completely sheltered them from the bitter political storm they helped create. The House’s January 6 Committee is pointing to Ivanka’s futile pleas for her father to halt the insurrection as further evidence to implicate the former President. And on December 1, New York’s attorney general subpoenaed Ivanka for testimony in its continuing Trump Organization fraud investigation (the company has pleaded not guilty), which she and her father are fighting together in court.

The town of Surfside, meanwhile, is itself America writ small, all too familiar with the festering division fostered by Javanka’s White House.

One Surfside resident who has been tickled about Javanka taking up in South Florida is Charles Burkett, the town’s mayor. “They’re not just here passing through,” he tells me, playing the role of town pitchman to the hilt. “I believe they want to make this a big part of their life, this part of the state of Florida generally, and specifically Surfside.”

There are certainly more politically friendly communities the couple might have sought out. Burkett, a 60-year-old Miami Beach native, edged out his 2020 rival, the progressive incumbent, by just 50 votes. Then again, while the unvaxed Trump voter didn’t really curry favor with the base during the race, since he’s been in office his Trumpian tactics and talking points may have felt second nature to Javanka.

In 2020, when there was talk of reducing Surfside’s law-enforcement budget—the town goes years without seeing a murder—Burkett blamed Salzhauer for wanting to “defund the police” and surfaced an incriminating (he said) photo of her at the 2017 DC Women’s March, in which Salzhauer holds an anti-Trump sign, while a friend’s placard reads HEY IVANKA—WE’RE HOLDING YOU ACCOUNTABLE. “This town is full of nutty right-wing supporters with alcohol issues and easy access to firearms,” Salzhauer later complained in an email to county ethics officials. “His published call to action that ‘It must be clearly demonstrated to politicians’ along with my photo is a clear dog-whistle threat to my physical safety.” Burkett responded in turn on his personal website, calling Salzhauer’s statement an “unforgivable attack on the integrity and character of the very people she has been elected to represent.”

During a town meeting over Zoom that same year, Burkett, a Catholic, complained that a Salzhauer-supported resolution to condemn discrimination against Asians and Jews during the pandemic was unfair to evangelical Christians. When Salzhauer interrupted him, he muted her. She responded by flashing him the double bird, blurry screen grabs of which made the rounds on the local news. Not surprisingly, they disagree about Javanka.

The tall, slender Burkett is out on the hard pack most days, jogging in a ball cap and mini-shorts, his shirtless trunk spit-roasting brown in the sun, and it was on one of his runs that he first met Ivanka. “It was almost like a collision,” he recalls. “Ivanka was walking out of the gate of her building, and I was jogging by.”

Burkett stopped and introduced himself. She suggested they continue their chat at a later time, and what do you know, Burkett got a follow-up call with an invite to meet the Kushners at home at the Arte.

Ivanka and Jared greeted him as their kids bustled about the condo. The conversation, as Burkett describes it, was “very generic,” with no discernible agenda on the Kushners’ side. “It was not unlike a conversation I would have with any other resident,” the mayor says. “It didn’t touch on any specific politics. It was a chance for them to educate themselves on their new home.”

Perhaps the couple just wanted a friend in the mayor’s office. Burkett, who resides in a $4-million oceanfront house, does happen to be an heir of a significant South Florida real-estate family. And actually, the Kushners did ask him to do what he could to protect Surfside—which has a 12-story building-height limit—from the kind of overdevelopment that plagues much of the Miami-Dade coastline. “They, like everyone else that I talk to, want to make sure we don’t turn into Miami Beach or Sunny Isles,” he says—never mind that the Trump name is on several gaudily oversize beachfront skyscrapers in the area.

Jared’s family business, the Kushner Companies, is busy in South Florida at the moment, involved in an estimated billion dollars’ worth of local development projects. Chaired by Jared’s father, the Trump-pardoned felon Charles Kushner, the company is building two large apartments in Miami-Dade and another nearby in Fort Lauderdale. (Jared’s Democrat brother, Joshua, a venture capitalist, last year bought a $23.5-million mansion on Miami Beach.) Jared himself started a venture-capital firm in Miami called Affinity Partners, where he’s hiring executives. He’s reportedly courting investments from Saudi Arabia, which is notable given his cozy and controversial White House relationship with Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. (MBS communicated solo with Jared on WhatsApp and reportedly boasted he had the First Son-in-Law “in his pocket.”) Jared has his own tell-all in the works for HarperCollins’s new conservative imprint, Broadside Books, scheduled for early this year.

Ivanka, meanwhile, has zero publicly known endeavors at the moment. Evan Ross, a Miami Democratic political consultant, says that when some “major Israel backers” in South Florida recently tried to arrange a meeting with her, Ivanka sent back word that she was declining for personal reasons. “It wasn’t that she didn’t want to meet with them specifically—it was that she just wasn’t taking any meetings,” says Ross. “That she’s leading a private life right now.” Officials in area GOP circles likewise report that Ivanka hasn’t “made a peep,” as one puts it—unlike her brothers, who continue to stir up the base on Fox News and social media (and who remain VPs of the Trump Organization).

Although there was talk at one point of Ivanka challenging Marco Rubio for the Senate, her father plainly admitted that his daughter didn’t see any benefit to getting into electoral politics herself. “She doesn’t really like the concept of running for office,” Donald Trump complained to a crowd in Georgia early last year. “She says, ‘What do I need it for, Dad?’ ” That was January 4, the last time Trump and Ivanka shared a stage together. Some weeks later, she reportedly called Rubio to say she had no designs on his seat and would support his campaign.

Ivanka turned 40 in October and celebrated with girlfriends over “two days of boating, beaches and bubbly . . . champagne toasts, cake, and caviar,” including at the Surf Club, per the New York Post’s Page Six. An unnamed source told the paper that Ivanka and Jared “love it down there [in South Florida]. It really suits them.” Indeed, the Kushners have reportedly purchased a $24-million home on neighboring Indian Creek Island: an 8,510-square-foot neoclassical mansion with eight and a half bathrooms, a sprawling double staircase rising up from the great room, and a white-columned facade that gives off strong Scarface vibes.

“I’ve lived in town for 16 years now—I’ve never been to Indian Creek, and it’s a couple of feet from my house. You can’t get there unless you’re invited. It’s like a fairy tale.”

With fewer than three dozen waterfront homes built around a golf course, Indian Creek is an infinitely more private setting than the Arte. It’s accessible for the yachtless only via a bridge that extends from Surfside—yet close enough for a family like the Kushners to walk to the Surfside synagogues for Shabbat services. The island’s single entrance is heavily guarded, and it has a private police force.

Investor Carl Icahn, ex–Sears CEO Eddie Lampert, and singer Julio Iglesias all own homes on the island, along with Gisele Bündchen and her husband, Tom Brady. The quarterback has had a famously hot-and-cold relationship with Donald Trump the last several years. But by and large, Indian Creek’s politics run red. According to Miami-Dade voting records, nearly 80 percent of the 53 votes in the 2020 election cast by the islanders went for Trump.

On Friday, October 29, Surfside decked itself out for Halloween. Town officials had hundreds of hay bales delivered to the 96th Street Park, where a maze for children was built. There was a petting zoo, dozens of pumpkins, a DJ, bounce houses. They called the event the “Spooktacular.”

Back in Washington, the House’s January 6 Committee was sparring with former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, growing frustrated as he stalled on their subpoena. Up in New York, news had just broken that the Westchester County district attorney’s office was investigating a Trump golf club there, compounding the Trump family’s problems in the state.

But at the Surfside Spooktacular, two former top White House aides were just two parents out for an unusual night of fun with their kids and 750 or so others. Young Theodore was dressed in a ninja outfit, while Ivanka and Jared came as themselves, she in a very plain black knee-length dress, he in designer jeans and a neatly pressed T-shirt. Jared spoke with Mayor Burkett and the police chief about how much he liked the town. (The Secret Service had been impressed with Surfside cops, he told them.) Ivanka was off following the kids.

“The most striking thing about it was that they were like anybody else and blended in with the crowd,” Burkett told me afterward.

Even Commissioner Salzhauer was pleasantly surprised by how the family did, for a short period of time, mix in seamlessly with the townsfolk. “At least the kids had a brief, fun taste of a normal childhood for Halloween,” she says.

As the Kushners were leaving the event, Ivanka bent down to pick a large pumpkin off the ground and started to walk off with it. Families were allowed to take one gourd home with them. Ivanka handed hers to Jared, who carried it the rest of the way. Their bodyguard, who followed Ivanka, also walked out with one.

The double-pumpkin takeaway may not have fallen strictly within the rules, but what’s a pumpkin or two in the scheme of things? This was Ivanka and Jared attending not some White House event or private-school recital or exclusive soiree in the Hamptons. It was just small-town life in South Florida, where they could easily slip out with their pumpkins and disappear into the night.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

An excellent read: "Shame Cometh: The Jared Kushner Story"

Quote

“When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom.”
—Proverbs 11:2

THE MATRIARCH was a hero of the Jewish resistance. One of the leaders of an improbable escape from the ghetto, she helped tunnel beneath the walls and electrified fences imprisoning the local Jewish population. After crawling through a tunnel longer than two football fields, she lived in the woods for months before joining an underground resistance group that fought the Nazis.

She wound up in Budapest after the liberation. There, she married a Holocaust survivor from the same sliver of Eastern Europe. He took her surname, as her family was wealthier and more prominent: Kushner.

The couple emigrated to America as Sh’erit ha-Pletah—Displaced Persons in Allied occupation zones. They started a new life in Elizabeth, New Jersey. They had three children. They put the horrible past behind them. They looked ahead to the sunshiny future.

The grandfather was a carpenter, a construction worker, and, in time, a real estate developer. Taking advantage of funding through various federal programs, he made it big. The grandfather became one of the so-called “Holocaust builders”—Jewish survivors of the Second World War who amassed vast fortunes in New Jersey real estate development. How better to combat all that destruction than to build?

A heroic Nazi-fighter and a great builder: these were the paternal grandparents.

The father married within the local Orthodox Jewish community. He and his wife had four children: two boys and two girls.

The father became the head of the company the grandfather built. On his watch, the family business became exponentially more successful. A kingdom became an empire. There were 10,000 apartment units, commercial properties, industrial properties, a bank.

The father gave away a lot of money. He endowed Jewish academies and synagogues. He sat on boards. He gave generously to charitable causes, in the U.S. and in Israel: hospitals, universities, religious organizations. Most of all, he donated to political campaigns—for Democrats, mostly.

The father was good at the politics side of the job. He was handsome and debonair. He liked people. He liked publicity. He liked power. He liked having the most powerful people in the world at his beck and call: the President of the United States, the future Prime Minister of Israel, and anyone who was anyone in New Jersey. He was a big wheel in Garden State politics, the sort of character who turns up in television programs about smoke-filled-back-room political intrigue, a kingmaker.

Until it all came crashing down.

The money, the power, the fame and fortune: none of it was enough for the father. He wanted to extend his empire into the Empire State. He wanted to run the Port Authority. He wanted to strongarm the new governor. In a word, he wanted more.

To get more, the father risked everything he and his family had built. He violated federal law, repeatedly. He filed false tax returns. He filed false campaign finance reports. When he discovered that his sister and brother-in-law were cooperating with a federal investigation, he hired a prostitute to “honeypot” his brother-in-law, videotaped the tryst, and sent the tape to his sister. That sleazy and ruthless act—witness tampering, technically—became one of the 18 counts to which he pleaded guilty. He served two years in federal prison, the first 14 months in Alabama.

When the father was released from jail, he was no longer a big wheel in local politics. He was no longer a kingmaker. He could no longer practice law. When he was mentioned now in the newspapers, his name was festooned with unseemly modifiers like disgraced and convicted felon and crook.

This was the father.

The son was tall and quiet, like his mother. He was intellectually lazy and not particularly smart, but was always convinced he knew better than anyone else, despite ample evidence to the contrary.

He got ho-hum grades in high school. His SAT tests were subpar. He applied to Harvard, but was only accepted after his father donated millions to the school.

He had an unusual college experience. On weekends he flew to Alabama to visit his father in prison. While taking classes, he ran some of the family real estate concerns in Boston. He did not leave a mark at the school. Little about him was memorable.

When he graduated, he went to work for the family real estate business. His big idea was to buy a building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. The cost was staggering: $1.8 billion. The deal closed in 2007, at the height of the boom. The real estate market collapsed, along with the rest of the economy, within months of the ink drying. The building was underwater. The debt service was onerous, threatening to bankrupt the family business. He was willing to do almost anything to prevent that from happening. If the investment failed, if the company failed, that meant that he had failed—that he hadn’t been right. And he was always right.

He married the daughter of an infamous New York personality, a loutish gossip column fixture who was a money launderer for the Russian mob. The family did not approve of her because she was not Jewish. To appease them, she converted—although she kept her last name, just as his grandmother had. He and his wife became a power couple, power brokers in the most powerful city in the world. That seemed to be the point of the marriage. Certainly there was no discernible passion on the part of either party, and plenty of lurid rumors. The wife would later describe their first date as “the best deal we ever made.”

He bought a beloved New York publication, known for its exquisite writing and the salmon color of its newspapers, and gutted it, destroying everything about it that made it special.

Like his father, he was good at networking. He knew lots of influential people: media magnates, heads of state, intelligence operatives, elder statesmen, PR executives, models, actors, politicians, cable news talking heads. Those influential people wielded their influence on his behalf, often in subtle ways. Unlike his father—but like the original Holocaust builders—he preferred to stay in the background. He shied away from publicity. He was a poor public speaker with a reedy, unpleasant speaking voice.

His kid brother married a supermodel, soaked up the good life, enjoyed jet-setting and hobnobbing with celebs in Southern California. Not him. He was more concerned with accruing power. He genuinely enjoyed the company of older men. He learned from them—insofar as he allowed himself to learn.

His father-in-law was running for president, as a Republican. The man was a buffoon, but he was a marketing genius, and he was family. His father-in-law asked him to join the team, despite him being a Democrat. He accepted. Power trumped politics. He took over social media operations. He worked with sophisticated tech companies that specialized in micro-targeting.

Through Henry Kissinger, of all people, he was connected to important players in the Russian government. The Russians wanted to help his father-in-law win the election. He wanted the same thing, and saw no reason why he should refuse the help. He lobbied for his father-in-law to hire as campaign chair a sleazy lobbyist with long ties to Russian intelligence. He met with Russians before his father-in-law’s first foreign policy speech, at a stately Washington hotel. When Russians promised dirt on his father-in-law’s political opponent, he met with them at the building that bore his wife’s family name. He met with Russians again in that same building, covertly, secreting them through a private entrance. At an upscale New York hotel, he met with the head of a sanctioned Russian bank; the Russians later said the meeting pertained to his family business. He proposed a backchannel via the Russian embassy, so he could talk to the Russians without anyone hearing.

It wasn’t limited to Russia. He met with other foreign nationals as well: princes from Saudi Arabia, from the United Arab Emirates. He met with anyone he thought could help his father-in-law’s campaign—or fix the longstanding problem of his company’s onerous debt on his Manhattan building.

None of this was legal.

After his father-in-law won, he took a job as a senior advisor. On the form senior advisors have to fill out to get a security clearance, he made key omissions. So he filled it out a second time. He made more omissions. So he filled it out a third time. He did not get the security clearance, but his father-in-law insisted he be given the job anyway. (Intentionally omitting meetings with foreign nationals on a security clearance form is a felony, but he was never charged.) He was a voracious consumer of the President’s Daily Brief, a document that contained all the highest-level top secret intelligence and national security information.

On the transition team, he and his wife wanted a general who had been fired by the previous president, and who was under FBI investigation for possible seditious activities, to be named national security advisor. His father-in-law took their advice. (The general was forced to leave the position a few months later, after he was caught lying to the FBI, and possibly to the Vice President. The general later pleaded guilty to making false statements.)

Through his PR connections, he was able to receive mostly favorable press, especially in the paper of record. A glowing feature of him ran in a prominent financial magazine, under the subtitle “Boy Wonder.” The press pushed the narrative that he and his wife were the mitigating influences in the White House. They were decent. They were normal. Through his tabloid connections, he was able to turn the gossip rags against the Democrats and also to kill stories that might be damaging to his father-in-law.

When he found out that the FBI was investigating his father-in-law’s campaign for meeting with all those Russians, he suggested to his father-in-law that the FBI director be fired. The FBI director is not popular with the Democrats, he said, because they believe he cost his father-in-law’s rival the election. They will love this, he said. His father-in-law listened, firing the FBI director. The Democrats did not love it. The Democrats thought it was obstruction of justice. The day after the FBI director was fired, the father-in-law met with Russian government officials in the Oval Office.

He was the de facto ambassador to Saudi Arabia. He befriended the Crown Prince, like him a Millennial, unlike him a psychopath. He spent a lot of time with the Crown Prince in Riyadh, so much so that the Crown Prince bragged that he was “in my pocket.” He gave the Crown Prince classified intelligence—information about who in the Saudi royal family was loyal and who was not. (After meeting with him, the Crown Prince initiated a purge of the royal family.) He lobbied for Saudi Arabia to be the first country his father-in-law would visit as president. Other presidents did not visit the Kingdom, because of the grotesque human rights abuses there. He didn’t care. The Saudis had money, lots of money, and he needed money, lots of money. And so his father-in-law made a state visit to the Kingdom.

Later, his buddy the Crown Prince had a dissident journalist murdered, the body hacked in pieces with a bone-saw. It is widely believed that he knew about the threat to this journalist, but did nothing to warn him.

His family was close with the disgustingly corrupt Prime Minister of Israel. They were old family friends. His father-in-law moved the Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which did nothing but piss off the Palestinians and thrill Rapture-happy Evangelicals.

He brokered a Middle East peace deal, which was really a business deal between his old family friend and his friends in various royal families—and, of course, him and his father-in-law.

He lobbied for a blockade of Qatar, our strongest Arab ally and the site of our largest military base in the Middle East, in order to secure a new loan for his family’s underwater Fifth Avenue building. In a roundabout way, this worked. The Qataris indirectly bailed out his company. The blockade was ended.

His portfolio was a catalogue of failure. He was tasked with solving the opioid crisis. He did not. He was tasked with ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He did not. He was tasked with building the wall between the U.S. and Mexico. He did not. He was tasked with managing the stockpile of medicine and PPE. He fucked that up royally—for the American people, at least, if not for his rich cronies. He hoarded the stuff and forced states to bid against each other for it.

During the early days of the pandemic, he set up a shadow task force to devise an appropriate response. When that task force gave him its recommendations—masks, contact tracing, federal coordination of supplies, etc.—he ignored them. The virus, he saw, was hitting the Blue States the hardest. It would help his father-in-law politically, he came to believe, if the pandemic continued to rage in those states. This way, his father-in-law could blame the governors of those states, who were all Democrats, for the escalating public health crisis, avoiding responsibility. So he decided to scuttle the plans given him by his own task force, and let the virus run amok.

At the time, the states hit the hardest by covid-19 were New York, New Jersey, and California. New York: where he lived for years, where most of his friends lived. New Jersey: where he grew up, where his parents lived. California: where his brother lived. He was willing to let the populations of those states—home to his family and friends—get sick and die to help his father-in-law’s re-election prospects.

Again: He was willing to let the populations of those states get sick and die to help his father-in-law’s re-election prospects.

As of this writing, 904,000 Americans have died of covid-19. The unofficial number is well over a million. Most of those deaths could have been prevented, had he and his father-in-law not sabotaged the pandemic response.

The grandson of Holocaust survivors allowed that mass death to happen.

He served in his father-in-law’s administration for four years and was the second-most powerful person in the White House. If he did anything to stop his father-in-law’s racist, sexist, cruel impulses, there is no evidence of it. During the Muslim travel ban, he did nothing. When refugee children were separated from their parents, he did nothing. After Charlottesville, when neo-Nazis paraded through the streets chanting “Jews will not replace us,” he did nothing—even as his father-in-law defended the neo-Nazis. During the Black Lives Matter protests, he did nothing. When his wife suggested they forcibly remove protestors so his father-in-law could get a photo in front of a church, he did nothing, and he did nothing as his father-in-law’s toxic rhetoric awakened white nationalist, neo-Nazi, anti-Semitic sentiment all across the country. He did nothing as Fascists took over the GOP—the same kind of hateful people who, eight decades ago, rounded up Jews like his paternal grandparents and sent them to concentration camps.

He and his wife made over half a billion dollars while working at the White House. That doesn’t count future earnings on connections forged and promises made during his time there—especially during the pandemic, when a lot of federal money went missing. He is now hitting up investors for his new investment capital concern. So far, he’s amassed some $3 billion. How much of this is payment for services rendered? How much of it is blood money?

Why has he not been charged for his many crimes? Who is protecting him, and for what purpose?

How does he live with himself? How does he sleep at night?

In two generations, the family went from escaping from Nazis to doing business with the Nazi bank of choice, from endowing Jewish causes to allying with anti-Semitic white nationalists, and from surviving the Holocaust to authorizing a Blue State Genocide.

This is the real Jared Kushner.

For shame.

 

[fraurosena]

16 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

An excellent read: "Shame Cometh: The Jared Kushner Story"

 

What an incredibly good read! 

[IrishCarrie]

18 hours ago, fraurosena said:

What an incredibly good read! 

Just so beautifully written; what a glorious talent to be able to put simple words together and create something that flows like cream!

[Cartmann99]

 

[Audrey2]

Most of me is saying "for what? Seriously, what did he do?"

The rest of me is saying if Donnie didn't get nominated this would just totally chat Donnie's hide if his son-in-law is nominated for a Nobel but not him.

[thoughtful]

1 minute ago, Audrey2 said:

Most of me is saying "for what? Seriously, what did he do?"

I understand he is very good at being pale. Also creepy. And he breathes, sleeps, and eats, as have all past Nobel prize winners - so, precedent.

Clearly he is an excellent choice. /s

[fraurosena]

3 hours ago, thoughtful said:

I understand he is very good at being pale. Also creepy. And he breathes, sleeps, and eats, as have all past Nobel prize winners - so, precedent.

Clearly he is an excellent choice. /s

I agree he’s pale and creepy, but has anyone ever seen him do any of the bolded? I have serious doubts…

[onekidanddone]

Is there a Nobel prize for being a slop bucket full of festering puss?

[fraurosena]

 

[fraurosena]

More info.

 

[Howl]

Interesting take by Vicky Ward Investigates on why, exactly, Kushner got the payoff and yes, she thinks it was a "Thank you!" present from MBS. 

EXCLUSIVE: The *Real* Reason Jared Kushner was Given $2 Billion to Invest by MBS
 

Always a good time to remember that there are a thousand million in a billion. 

 

[Cartmann99]

32 minutes ago, Howl said:

Always a good time to remember that there are a thousand million in a billion. 

That's more money than I can comprehend.