vanityfair
Earlier this week,
Ivanka Trump explained that a federal jobs guarantee was a terrible idea that no one should support because “Americans, in their heart, [don’t] want to be given something. . . . People want to work for what they get.” This struck many as something of a curious philosophy, given the circumstances under which both the First Daughter and her husband earned their jobs in the White House (having them handed to them, despite their egregious lack of qualifications), in addition to everything else in their lives. And on Thursday, a new report suggested that Ivanka and Jared may not subscribe to the “no handouts” policy, for themselves, at all!
The New York Times reports that the only reason
Jared Kushner was granted the highest level of security clearance last May was because his father-in-law,
Donald Trump, demanded it—over the objections of intelligence officials, the White House’s top lawyer, and the chief of staff at the time. Prior to May, Kushner had been assigned clearance on an “interim top-secret” basis, which was downgraded to “secret” in February 2018, and which limited his access to classified information. And for good reason!
Unsurprisingly, the holdup did not sit well with either Kushner or Ivanka (who had also been operating on a temporary clearance), creating a situation that the couple presumably dealt with in a professional and reasonable fashion, i.e., by stomping their feet and yelling, “DADDY, WE WANT OUR TOP-SECRET SECURITY CLEARANCE, AND WE WANT IT NOW!”
To be clear, the normal process for granting someone a security clearance involves the White House’s personnel security office making a determination after an F.B.I. background check. If there is a dispute about how to move forward—something that rarely happens—the White House counsel makes the call, which, in this case, was overruled by the president, another highly unusual occurrence. Also highly unusual? For the president, his daughter, and his son-in-law’s lawyer to insist everything was done by the book when that clearly wasn’t the case:
(Ivanka’s
exact words: “There were anonymous leaks about there being issues. But the president had no involvement pertaining to my clearance or my husband’s clearance, zero.”)
In a statement on Thursday, White House spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “We don’t comment on security clearances.” Peter Mirijanian, a spokesman for Kushner’s lawyer, offered the bizarre explanation that new revelations don’t change the original statements, even if said revelations suggest the original statements were lies. (“In 2018, White House and security-clearance officials affirmed that Mr. Kushner’s security clearance was handled in the regular process with no pressure from anyone,” Mirijanian said. “That was conveyed to the media at the time, and new stories, if accurate, do not change what was affirmed at the time.”)
