Ivanka and Jared 3: Treason Barbie and Ken

[Howl]

Josh @ Talking Points Memo amplifies a bit on Vicky Ward's take on Kushner - MBS mutual back rubbing.  He points out that MBS has not been amenable current US requests to up Saudi production, thus lowering the per BBL price, thus giving US consumers a break in gas prices.  MBS was only too happy to respond quickly to Trump's requests to raise/lower production.  

Princelings and War Crimes  The Kushner-bin Salman connection runs even deeper than you think

Josh also notes that there was a recent multi-day event in Saudi Arabia, bringing together mega high flyers/power players in the investment world.  Every night Jared was seated close or beside MBS.   

[Cartmann99]

[Alisamer]

On 4/16/2022 at 7:55 PM, Cartmann99 said:

That's more money than I can comprehend.

I try to comprehend it this way:  A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years.

A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.

There are 86,400 seconds in a day. So assuming no interest, no earning, etc. a billionaire would have to spend $86,400 a day for 31 years to spend it all. That's more than 31 and a half million a year.

In reality, with interest, investment earnings, etc. the richest people in the world make more money while using the toilet each day than most Americans earn in a year. It is practically mathematically impossible for them to spend all of it, without making a conscious effort to do so.

Edited May 2, 2022 by Alisamer

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

[GreyhoundFan]

"Ivanka Trump’s Jan. 6 testimony exposes family strain"

Quote

Former president Donald Trump has demanded that many of his aides and advisers claim privilege and resist subpoenas from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

Not his daughter and son-in-law, though.

“I said, ‘Whatever you want to do is okay with me.’ I didn’t even speak to them about it,” Trump recounted in an April interview with The Washington Post. “Don’t care what they said. Let them say the truth. I told them that: ‘Just say the truth.’ ”

But when the public got its first glimpse on Thursday night of what Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner had to say, the former president appeared less generous — issuing a statement that pushed back on her testimony.

“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” Trump posted on his Truth Social platform. “She had long since checked out.”

Trump was reacting to a short clip of Ivanka Trump that was played during Rep. Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) opening statement, in which the former president’s daughter said she accepted Attorney General William P. Barr’s conclusion that there was no widespread fraud affecting the outcome — even as her father was continuing in public to falsely insist it had been stolen.

“It affected my perspective,” Ivanka Trump said in the clip. “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”

The discord marks a new twist on a close father-daughter relationship that has spanned family, business and politics, exposing a rift that has opened since the 2020 election, according to other Trump advisers. Before Jan. 6, Ivanka Trump broke with her father and siblings in avoiding baseless fraud allegations and attempts to overturn the election results. On the day of the Capitol riot, she repeatedly tried to convince the president to make a statement or video calling for his supporters to stop the attack, The Post has reported.

That tension could mount as the committee holds more hearings this month. Ivanka Trump’s descriptions of her efforts to press her father into action on Jan. 6 have made her a key witness for investigators, people familiar with her testimony said. The committee interviewed both Ivanka Trump and Kushner for hours and has also indicated that it will release transcripts.

“You’re probably going to get a heavy dose of Jared and Ivanka going forward,” said a lawyer representing other witnesses who spoke on the condition of anonymity because those discussions are confidential. Committee sources viewed Ivanka Trump and Kushner as sometimes helpful and at times frustrating, according to multiple advisers — but particularly useful in understanding Trump’s psyche.

Trump said in the Post interview that they didn’t tell him in advance about what they planned to say in testimony and that he viewed the committee’s focus on Ivanka as “harassment.”

The testimony’s impact was heightened on Thursday by the use of a video excerpt — a bold step for a congressional investigation that came as a surprise even to people closely following the probe. The clip made for one of the most dramatic moments in the first hearing, which drew a television audience of almost 19 million Americans.

“I don’t know if anybody walked in thinking they’re going to have videos shown on prime time,” said a former Trump White House adviser, who like others interviewed for this report spoke on the condition of anonymity to relay private discussions.

Representatives for Ivanka Trump, Kushner and Donald Trump did not respond to requests for comment. But another former Trump adviser disputed that Trump was angry with his daughter over the testimony. The aim of his statement, the former adviser said, was to emphasize that Ivanka wasn’t involved in legal discussions.

The committee also played a short clip of Kushner’s testimony in which he appeared dismissive of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s threats to resign in protest of some pardon discussions.

“I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you,” Kushner said in the video.

Trump has not made any public response to Kushner’s testimony. Privately, he has complained about Kushner’s role in the reelection campaign and the many White House efforts that Kushner has tried to take credit for, according to three people who have spoken to Trump.

Since Trump left office, his daughter and son-in-law have not attended meetings on political travel, spending or other parts of his political operation and have rarely spoken with his other advisers. The couple have reportedly bought an estate on an exclusive Miami-Dade island. One adviser who is regularly around the president said: “I’ve seen Jared one time.” But the former president still regularly talks to Ivanka Trump.

His post on Friday also appeared to defend his daughter’s testimony as “only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr” — whom Trump had much harsher words for.

Some other conservatives criticized the use of the video as a cheap shot. “The Ivanka Trump clip has gotten a lot of attention, but its inclusion was entirely gratuitous and clearly meant simply to embarrass her,” National Review’s editor in chief, Rich Lowry, said on Twitter.

In deciding to cooperate with the committee, Ivanka Trump and Kushner may have considered the investigators’ aggressive use of criminal contempt referrals for witnesses refusing to appear.

“They didn’t want to be in the same category as Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro,” the lawyer representing other witnesses said, referring to the former Trump advisers who’ve been indicted after defying the committee’s subpoenas.

Ivanka Trump has long participated in her father’s business ventures, including a New York condo project that recently drew prosecutors’ scrutiny but no charges, and the Washington hotel at the center of multiple conflict-of-interest investigations and lawsuits during his presidency. She also branched out to launch her own clothing line, and Kushner brought his own wealth, media ventures and family real estate empire.

As the couple sidestepped anti-nepotism rules to take White House jobs, Ivanka Trump initially presented herself as a moderating force. A onetime Democrat who supported gay rights and abortion rights, she later announced that she became a “Trump Republican” and opposed abortion, prompting speculation about her own political ambitions. The couple’s special treatment as the only advisers who could stake out their own positions and could not be fired was frequently a sore point for other staffers.

“They could float in and out when they wanted to, while the rest of everybody else didn’t have that luxury,” the former White House official said. “They sold the whole thing at the beginning as being the people who could moderate him. They clearly couldn’t do that. At the end, they knew they weren’t going to change his mind, so why be party to a bunch of this stuff?”

In another sign of the couple’s uneasy independence, they have in the past shown a rare willingness among Trump insiders to cooperate with investigators. During the special counsel investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, Kushner worked with well-respected lawyers who gave conciliatory public statements, in contrast to the more combative tone from Donald Trump’s legal team.

It’s not clear what other information Ivanka Trump gave investigators that could show up in upcoming hearings. The committee’s letter asking her to testify referenced Trump’s plan to impede the counting electoral votes, whether he sought to block the deployment of the National Guard and what he was doing in the days after the attack regarding ongoing threats of violence.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"Jared and Ivanka, Without the Power or the Masks"

Quote

WASHINGTON — They were stripped of their White House backdrop, their power and their masks.

In brief video clips, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump appeared in the first of a half-dozen public hearings held by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

First up was Ms. Trump. Speaking in a soft voice and seemingly aware that the video might be made public someday, she said she believed the words of the former attorney general, William P. Barr, who on Dec. 1, 2020, said that there was no widespread fraud impacting the election that had taken place three weeks earlier.

“It affected my perspective,” Ms. Trump said quietly, peering into a camera for a recorded interview that did not take place in person. “I respect Attorney General Barr. So I accepted what he said — was saying.”

That was despite what her father, President Donald J. Trump, was claiming, and despite the fact that, according to several White House aides working alongside her, she did little to try to temper his false claims that he had won the 2020 election. She continued to travel with him as he vented his claims in public.

Next was Mr. Kushner. In his video he was pressed by Representative Liz Cheney, the committee’s vice chairwoman, about whether he was aware that the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, had been threatening to resign because Mr. Trump was making increasingly outlandish efforts to stay in power.

“Like I said,” said Mr. Kushner, who was rarely heard from in public during his father-in-law’s presidency, “my interest at that time was on trying to get as many” presidential pardons finished as possible. Mr. Kushner repeatedly inserted himself into the pardons process, prompting complaints from legal experts and some of his colleagues. He added that he knew that Mr. Cipollone and “the team were always saying, ‘Oh we are going to resign, we are not going to be there if this happens, if that happens.’ So I kind of took it up to just be whining, to be honest with you.”

Ms. Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, sounding grim, spoke to the hearing room after the video ended. “Whining,” she said. “There’s a reason why people serving in our government take an oath to the constitution. As our founding fathers recognized, democracy is fragile. The people in positions of public trust are duty bound to defend it, to step forward when action is required. In our country, we don’t swear an oath to an individual or a political party.”

Mr. Kushner’s words enraged Mr. Cipollone’s former colleagues, many of whom traded messages as they complained to reporters and one another as the hearing went on that the former president’s son-in-law was “arrogant.”

No two people had positioned themselves as prominently in Mr. Trump’s White House as his daughter and his son-in-law, who came on as official advisers despite anti-nepotism laws and warnings from other aides that hiring family members can be fraught. Over four years, the two tended carefully to their images.

Aides feared getting on the wrong side of the couple, who lived in Washington’s expensive Kalorama neighborhood and hosted dinners for the city’s political elite.

The videos made clear that both were aware that things were going awry within the White House. But according to more than a half-dozen former Trump advisers, although both have attempted to distance themselves from that period, neither made much of an effort to pull Mr. Trump away from his obsession with staying in power.

Instead, they left that task to the paid staff, who in turn kept waiting for the family to intervene more aggressively. Shortly after Election Day, most aides tried to avoid the Oval Office, fearful of having to listen to Mr. Trump vent. They were also eager to avoid the worst- case scenario: a directive from Mr. Trump that might have been illegal, and could have ensnared them in an investigation.

 

[onekidanddone]

Anyone notice the resemblance between OffIvanka and Stephen Vampire Miller?

[thoughtful]

2 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Anyone notice the resemblance between OffIvanka and Stephen Vampire Miller?

I've said it before and I'll say it again - I really try not to judge by looks, and I don't think being evil makes people physically ugly, but this crop of evil people are like living caricatures - vampire-like Jared and Miller, Trump, Giuliani, Gaetz, Cruz, and eyes-too-close Marge. A cartoonist's dream, most of them.

I kept thinking that Jared reminded me of something from Star Trek, and I couldn't place it. Then I realized it was the pale, quiet clones called the Vorta, especially Weyoun.

The premise is that these characters were genetically engineered to kiss up to the powers that be, and he (well, they - the same actor played a series of the clones in the Weyoun line) oozed obsequious, unctuous toadying, with an undercurrent of feeling like he could betray his overlords at a moment's notice.

Spoiler

 

https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Weyoun

[fraurosena]

A few thoughts on Jared and Ivanka.

Of course, first the obligatory caveat that a person can’t be diagnosed from images… but Jared really doesn’t look good in that clip. The dark circles under his eyes are in stark contrast to his pale (vampiric?) skin. His eyes seem to be filled with fear. His arrogance feels like a front to cover up a deep-seated anxiety.

And oh, the irony! Here we were, often saying that daddy dearest would throw even his most beloved child under the bus if it meant saving his own skin, and look at how she is shoving him under the wheels instead.

They showed only a tiny fragment of her hours long testimony, so who knows how many other damning statements she made about her father, just to look all wide eyed and innocent herself.

Edited June 12, 2022 by fraurosena

[Becky]

I have always thought Ivanka looks like someone who has been browbeaten and bullied into believing she must fit someone else's idea of a perfect woman.  She always looks uptight and like she is trying too hard; like she is waiting for someone's judgment to fall on her, and is afraid.   She does not strike me as a particularly happy person.  I have never seen her with a real, natural smile.  I wonder how much of her life has been her own free choice. I have lived with this in my own life, so maybe I am projecting - or maybe I simply recognize it when I see it.  

Not to say I have much sympathy for her - if anyone has the resources to "get out" and make a different path for herself, she could.  And I am sure her lifestyle offers her lots of luxurious distractions.  But it to me it feels a bit like someone who has been abused in some way and is fearful.  

Jared, on the other hand, just comes across as an arrogant asshole.  

[onekidanddone]

11 hours ago, thoughtful said:

I've said it before and I'll say it again - I really try not to judge by looks, and I don't think being evil makes people physically ugly, but this crop of evil people are like living caricatures - vampire-like Jared and Miller, Trump, Giuliani, Gaetz, Cruz, and eyes-too-close Marge. A cartoonist's dream, most of them.

I kept thinking that Jared reminded me of something from Star Trek, and I couldn't place it. Then I realized it was the pale, quiet clones called the Vorta, especially Weyoun.

The premise is that these characters were genetically engineered to kiss up to the powers that be, and he (well, they - the same actor played a series of the clones in the Weyoun line) oozed obsequious, unctuous toadying, with an undercurrent of feeling like he could betray his overlords at a moment's notice.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

https://villains.fandom.com/wiki/Weyoun

To me it is the soulless look behind the eyes. 

8 hours ago, fraurosena said:

A few thoughts on Jared and Ivanka.

Of course, first the obligatory caveat that a person can’t be diagnosed from images… but Jared really doesn’t look good in that clip. The dark circles under his eyes are in stark contrast to his pale (vampiric?) skin. His eyes seem to be filled with fear. His arrogance feels like a front to cover up a deep-seated anxiety.

And oh, the irony! Here we were, often saying that daddy dearest would throw even his most beloved child under the bus if it meant saving his own skin, and look at how she is shoving him under the wheels instead.

They showed only a tiny fragment of her hours long testimony, so who knows how many other damning statements she made about her father, just to look all wide eyed and innocent herself.

21st century King Lear

[GreyhoundFan]

 

 

More good replies to Treason Barbie:

Spoiler

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

Maybe I am just nitpicking, but it seems rather gauche to refer to his title by initials in the first sentence rather than spell it out in its entirety and then just refer to him by his last name in the second sentence.  It is supposed to be a message of tribute to a dignitary.  She would likely get her knickers in a twist if someone was paying a respectful tribute to her daddy and called him Prez Donald J. Trump and then Trump.  It seems to me like she had to make sure to save characters to insert the bit about herself and her "government service".  

[WiseGirl]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Awesome review of Slenderman's memoir: "Jared Kushner’s ‘Breaking History’ Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir"

Quote

The United States Secret Service isn’t known for its sense of humor, but when it gave Jared Kushner the code name “mechanic,” was someone betting that he’d call his memoir “Breaking History”?

It’s a title that, in its thoroughgoing lack of self-awareness, matches this book’s contents. Kushner writes as if he believes foreign dignitaries (and less-than dignitaries) prized him in the White House because he was the fresh ideas guy, the starting point guard, the dimpled go-getter.

He betrays little cognizance that he was in demand because, as a landslide of other reporting has demonstrated, he was in over his head, unable to curb his avarice, a cocky young real estate heir who happened to unwrap a lot of Big Macs beside his father-in-law, the erratic and misinformed and similarly mercenary leader of the free world. Jared was a soft touch.

“Breaking History” is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering (the “mechanic”) with issues he was interested in.

This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo.

The tone is college admissions essay. Typical sentence: “In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives.”

Every political cliché gets a fresh shampooing. “Even in a starkly divided country, there are always opportunities to build bridges,” Kushner writes. And, quoting the former White House deputy chief of staff Chris Liddell: “Every day here is sand through an hourglass, and we have to make it count.” So true, for these are the days of our lives.

Kushner, poignantly, repeatedly beats his own drum. He recalls every drop of praise he’s ever received; he brings these home and he leaves them on the doorstep. You turn the pages and find, almost at random, colleagues, some of them famous, trying to be kind, uttering things like:

It’s really not fair how the press is beating you up. You made a very positive contribution

I don’t know how you do this every day on so many topics. That was really hard! You deserve an award for all you’ve done.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again. This agreement would not have happened if it wasn’t for Jared.

Jared did an amazing job working with Bob Lighthizer on the incredible USMCA trade deal we signed yesterday.

Jared’s a genius. People complain about nepotism — I’m the one who got the steal here.

I’ve been in Washington a long time, and I must say, Jared is one of the best lobbyists I’ve ever seen.

A therapist might call these cries for help.

“Breaking History” opens with the story of Kushner’s father, the real estate tycoon Charles Kushner, who was imprisoned after hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, having the encounter filmed and sending the tape to his sister. He was a good man who did a bad thing, Jared says, and Chris Christie, while serving as the United States attorney for New Jersey, was cruel to prosecute him so mercilessly.

There is a flashback to Kushner’s grandparents, Holocaust survivors who settled in New Jersey and did well. There’s a page or two about Kushner’s time at Harvard. He omits the fact that he was admitted after his father pledged $2.5 million to the college.

If Kushner can recall a professor or a book that influenced him while in Cambridge, he doesn’t say. Instead, he recalls doing his first real estate deals while there. He moved to New York, and bought and ruined a great newspaper (The New York Observer) by dumbing it down and feting his friends in its pages.

His wooing of Ivanka Trump included a good deal of jet-setting. Kushner briefly broke up with her, he writes, because she wasn’t Jewish. (She would later convert.) Wendi Murdoch, Rupert’s wife, reunited them on Rupert’s yacht. Kushner describes the power scene:

On that Sunday, we were having lunch at Bono’s house in the town of Eze on the French Riviera, when Rupert stepped out to take a call. He came back and whispered in my ear, “They blinked, they agreed to our terms, we have The Wall Street Journal.” After lunch, Billy Joel, who had also been with us on the boat, played the piano while Bono sang with the Irish singer-songwriter Bob Geldof.

With or without you, Bono.

Once in the White House, Kushner became Little Jack Horner, placing a thumb in everyone else’s pie, and he wonders why he was disliked. He read Sun Tzu and imagined he was becoming a warrior. It was because he had Trump’s ear, however, that he won nearly every time he locked antlers with a rival. Corey Lewandowski — out. Steve Bannon — out.

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who begged Kushner to stop meddling internationally — out. (Kushner cites Tillerson’s “reclusive approach” to foreign policy.) By the end, Tillerson was like a dead animal someone needed to pull a tarpaulin over.

Kushner was pleased that the other adults in the room, including the White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, the White House counsel Don McGahn and the later chief of staff John Kelly, left or were ejected because they tried, patriotically, to exclude him from meetings he shouldn’t have been in. The fact that he was initially denied security clearance, he writes, was much ado about nothing.

The bulk of “Breaking History” — at nearly 500 pages, it’s a slog — goes deeply into the weeds (Kushner, in his acknowledgments, credits a ghostwriter, the speechwriter Brittany Baldwin) on the issues he cared most about, including prison reform, the Covid response and the Middle East, where he had a win with the Abraham Accords.

This book ends with Kushner suggesting he was unaware of the events of Jan. 6 until late in the day. He mostly sidesteps talking about spurious claims of election fraud. He seems to have no beliefs beyond carefully managed appearances and the art of the deal. He wants to stay on top of things, this manager, but doesn’t want to get to the bottom of anything.

You finish “Breaking History” wondering: Who is this book for? There’s not enough red meat for the MAGA crowd, and Kushner has never appealed to them anyway. Political wonks will be interested — maybe, to a limited degree — but this material is more thoroughly and reliably covered elsewhere. He’s a pair of dimples without a demographic.

What a queasy-making book to have in your hands. Once someone has happily worked alongside one of the most flagrant and systematic and powerful liars in this country’s history, how can anyone be expected to believe a word they say?

It makes a kind of sense that Kushner is likely to remain exiled in Florida. “The whole peninsula of Florida was weighted down with regret,” as Cynthia Ozick put it in “The Shawl.” “Everyone had left behind a real life.”

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Aww, poor Jared, he's such a victim. /s

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Jared continues to display a total lack of awareness:

 

[Howl]

On 6/12/2022 at 6:54 AM, Becky said:

But it to me it feels a bit like someone who has been abused in some way and is fearful.  

Noel Casler believes she was abused by her father -- if not actually physically, Trump has implied he's sexually attracted to her -- a lot of inappropriateness. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Oh Jared.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Whoops...

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

 

Humans doing the Lord Daniel's work right here. 

[GreyhoundFan]

Jared is so popular...

 

[Becky]

4 hours ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Jared is so popular...

 

Is he serious? He sounds like he believes this. Maybe there is context missing, because if he believes this, he is as insane as his father-in-law.