Donald Trump’s son-in-law also says Israel should bulldoze an area of the Negev desert and move Palestinians there
Jared Kushner has praised the “very valuable” potential of Gaza’s “waterfront property” and suggested Israel should remove civilians while it “cleans up” the strip.
The former property dealer, married to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, made the comments in an interview at Harvard University on 8 March.
Continue reading...The son-in-law and former adviser to the ex-president testified that Trump seemed to believe that he had won the 2020 election
Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner was among several witnesses to testify before a grand jury in recent weeks about the former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, US media reported on Thursday.
Testifying at a federal courthouse in Washington DC last month, Kushner, a former White House adviser to Trump, said it was his impression that Trump truly believed the 2020 election was stolen, the New York Times reported, citing a person briefed on the matter.
Continue reading...Special counsel looking into Trump’s efforts to overturn 2020 election subpoenas former president’s daughter and son-in-law
Former US president Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka Trump have been subpoenaed by the special counsel Jack Smith to testify before a federal grand jury regarding the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the New York Times reported on Wednesday, citing sources.
Merrick Garland, the attorney general, appointed Smith in November last year to take over two investigations involving Trump, who is running for president in 2024.
Continue reading...Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson grilled on why Jared Kushner should escape scrutiny for profiting from proximity to presidency
The Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson refused to say Republicans planning investigations of Hunter Biden for profiting from his connection to the presidency should also investigate Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and adviser who secured a $1.2bn loan from Qatar while working in the White House.
“I’m concerned about getting to the truth,” Johnson insisted. “I don’t target individuals.”
Continue reading...Republican operative calls Trump an ‘abortionist bitch’ in video released by film-maker who provided footage to January 6 panel
In video released by a Danish film-maker who provided footage to the January 6 committee, Roger Stone, furious he will not be pardoned for his activities around the Capitol attack, is seen to call Ivanka Trump an “abortionist bitch”.
The Republican operative also says Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and like her an adviser to Donald Trump in the White House, “has an IQ of 70”.
Continue reading...Senate finance panel chair sends detailed questions to financial firm on deal for property owned by then White House aide’s family
A financial firm that operates billions of dollars in real estate properties around the world is facing new questions from the powerful chairman of the Senate finance committee about whether Qatar was secretly involved in the $1.2bn rescue of a Fifth Avenue property owned by Jared Kushner’s family while Kushner was serving in the White House.
Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who leads the finance committee, has given the chief executive of Toronto-based Brookfield Asset Management until 24 October to answer a series of detailed questions about a 2018 deal in which Brookfield paid Kushner Companies for a 99-year lease on the family’s marquee 666 Fifth Avenue property.
Continue reading...Ex-adviser says president in 2020 agreed that his son-in-law had to be replaced by Steve Bannon but did not dare try to fire him
In June 2020, less than five months before polling day, Donald Trump agreed to a “coup d’état” to remove his son-in-law Jared Kushner from control of his presidential re-election campaign and replace him with the far-right provocateur Steve Bannon.
The coup had support from Donald Trump Jr but according to a new book by the former Trump aide Peter Navarro it did not work, after Trump refused to give Kushner the bad news himself.
Continue reading...In forthcoming memoir, obtained by the Guardian, former adviser claims to have made hugely consequential intervention
In a forthcoming memoir, Jared Kushner says he personally intervened to stop Donald Trump attacking Rupert Murdoch in response to the media mogul’s criticism, at the outset of Trump’s move into politics in 2015.
In the book, Breaking History, Kushner writes: “Trump called me. He’d clearly had enough. ‘This guy’s no good. And I’m going to tweet it.’
Continue reading...John Kelly, who Kushner and wife saw as ‘consistently duplicitous’, ‘showed his true character’ in hallway incident, memoir says
While chief of staff to Donald Trump, the retired general John Kelly “shoved” Ivanka Trump in a White House hallway, Jared Kushner writes in his forthcoming memoir.
The detail from Breaking History, which will be published in August, was reported by the Washington Post.
Continue reading...The meeting comes in the wake of other family members such as Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner testifying to the committee
Donald Trump Jr. has agreed to meet in the near future with the US House of Representatives panel that is investigating the 6 January 2021, attack on the US Capitol, the New York Times reported Thursday, citing a source.
Trump, the eldest son of former president Donald Trump, is set to meet with the House committee of his own will and without the threat of a subpoena, the outlet said without reporting when the testimony was scheduled.
Continue reading...Donald Trump’s eldest daughter, a former senior White House adviser, to speak virtually to committee about events of January 6
Ivanka Trump will testify before the January 6 committee on Tuesday.
The Guardian confirmed that former president Donald Trump’s oldest daughter, and former senior White House adviser, will speak to the panel virtually.
Continue reading...Barak Ravid has written a fascinating account of four chaotic years in which some progress was nonetheless made
Trump’s Peace is a blockbuster of a book. Barak Ravid captures the 45th president saying “Fuck him” to Benjamin Netanyahu and reducing American Jews to antisemitic caricatures. Imagine the Republican reaction if Barack Obama had done that. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham would plotz. But Trump? Crickets.
Ravid also delivers a mesmerizing tick-tock of the making of the Abraham Accords, the normalization of Israel’s relations with four non-neighboring Arab states.
Continue reading...Alleged sedition and a royal family feud may have been driven by a broader plan to reshape the Middle East
The phone call that shook the Jordanian government came in the second week of March this year. On the line to the General Intelligence Directorate (GID) in Amman was the US Embassy, seeking an urgent meeting about a matter of national importance. The kingdom’s spies were startled. Danger was brewing on the home front, they were told, and could soon pose a threat to the throne.
Within hours, the GID had turned its full array of resources towards one of the country’s most senior royals, Prince Hamzah bin Hussein, a former crown prince and half-brother of the king, whom the Americans suspected was sowing dissent and had begun rallying supporters. By early April, officials had placed Hamzah under house arrest and publicly accused the former heir and two close aides of plotting to unseat King Abdullah.
Continue reading...Kushner and his deputy Avi Berkowitz join Greta Thunberg and Alexei Navalny on the nominations list
Former White House senior adviser Jared Kushner and his deputy, Avi Berkowitz, have been nominated for the Nobel peace prize for their role in negotiating four normalisation deals between Israel and Arab nations known as the “Abraham Accords”.
Kushner, who is Trump’s son-in-law, and Berkowitz, who was the Middle East envoy, were key figures in negotiating deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.
Continue reading...Secret Service detail were forced to use porta-potties or neighbors’ bathrooms until government rented them an apartment
The dying days of the Trump administration have been plagued by yet more scandal in the form of riots, Twitter bans and impeachment. Now the Washington Post has added another: water closet gate.
In a multi-bylined article one of America’s top investigative news outlets has chronicled in leg-crossing detail the apparently extreme difficulty that the Secret Service detail assigned to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump have had in finding a place to go to the bathroom.
Continue reading...President also gives clemency to Roger Stone in second round of pardons since Tuesday
Donald Trump has pardoned another 26 people in his second big wave of clemency actions since Tuesday, marking yet another audacious application of presidential power to reward loyalists.
The US president pardoned his former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, his longtime adviser Roger Stone, and Charles Kushner, the father of his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner.
Continue reading...Saudi prince hails progress in negotiations brokered by Kuwait and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner
A breakthrough in the three-and-a-half-year dispute between Qatar and its neighbouring Gulf states appears to have been achieved following what were described as “fruitful” talks to resolve the conflict.
The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud, said “significant progress” had been reached in the last few days and he was optimistic all countries were close to finalising a resolution.
Continue reading...Senior White House adviser and his team to travel this week for talks with Saudi crown prince and emir of Qatar
White House senior adviser Jared Kushner is headed to Saudi Arabia and Qatar this week for talks in a region simmering with tension after the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist.
A senior administration official said on Sunday that Kushner is to meet the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, in the Saudi city of Neom, and the emir of Qatar in that country in the coming days. Kushner will be joined by Middle East envoys Avi Berkowitz and Brian Hook and Adam Boehler, chief executive of the US International Development Finance Corporation.
Continue reading...The Palestinians are hoping a Biden presidency will slow the growing rapport between Saudi Arabia and Israel
During the last year of Donald Trump’s presidency, the question of whether Saudi Arabia would make peace with Israel had come down to a question of when.
The terms of such a deal were more or less agreed during Trump’s tumultuous term, thrashed out between his envoy and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and the kingdom’s effective ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, who held a very different view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from other Saudi leaders.
Their outlook centred on Iran rather than the Israeli-Palestinian conflict being the centre of the region’s dysfunction. And Israel, they agreed, could help, not hinder, progress on that score. Prince Mohammed eschewed his father and uncles’ views that a return to 1967 lines was a starting point for peace, in favour of the Kushner line that Palestinian leaders had caused talks to stagnate.
Ties warmed quickly, especially from May 2017, when Saudi Arabia received Trump as a conquering hero after he overturned the nuclear deal with Tehran and reorientated Washington’s focus to Riyadh.
The secret channels used to communicate between the kingdom and Israel were discarded. So was the need for mediators, as Saudi officials made regular visits to Tel Aviv and vice versa. Denials of such trips were replaced by hints that they had taken place. Then came peace deals with Saudi allies, the UAE and Bahrain, and now a visit by Benjamin Netanyahu to Prince Mohammed on Saudi soil that Israel didn’t bother to disguise.
Despite a flight path visible on flight tracking sites, which showed the arrival of Netanyahu’s preferred charter jet on the shores of the Red Sea city of Neom, Riyadh responded with a pro forma denial.
There to meet the Israeli prime minister on the shores of the Red Sea was outgoing US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, on a mission to finalise as much as he can before he loses his job in eight weeks. Securing a peace pact is something Pompeo, Kushner and Trump have desperately pushed for and such a deal would indeed be seismic in the Middle East, where many are nervously awaiting its impact.
Confusion reigns as accounts of attempts to talk president into conceding to Joe Biden are swiftly shot down
As Donald Trump spent Sunday morning visiting one of his golf clubs and doubling down on bogus election fraud claims, conflicting reports emerged about whether the president’s family and top advisers were advising him to admit defeat.
Related: Joe Biden gets to work as president-elect while Trump refuses to concede
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