We don’t have to wait too much longer. Tomorrow night the televised hearings of the January 6 Committee begin and the video testimony of both Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner will play, if not Thursday, then in the days to come. The GOPers are panic stricken at this, ergo their insistence that “a caravan of 10,000 people is headed for the border” and also the insistence that “nobody cares about January 6. They only care about gas prices.” We’ll see what the people care about, now won’t we?
The New York Times is running a lengthy piece on Jared Kushner and the final days of Donald Trump in the White House. It’s a good source of reference and context and I believe a foreshadowing of what Kushner’s — and Ivanka’s — testimony will contain. Bottom line: the Kushners exited, the crazies, i.e., Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, entered. Since Rudy was a key player in Impeachment I, it stood to reason that anything he would do post-election would be disastrous. And so it came to pass. Kushner was no biblical prophet, but he could connect the dots to that extent.
One of the most striking realizations that emerged from the book research [from which a lot of the material below was taken] was how many people around Mr. Trump did not believe the election had been stolen but kept quiet or checked out, including White House officials and campaign aides. Hope Hicks, long one of his closest advisers, told him it was time to move on. “Well, Hope doesn’t believe in me,” Mr. Trump responded bitterly. “No, I don’t,” she replied. “Nobody’s convinced me otherwise.” She disappeared in the final weeks of the administration.
Kellyanne Conway, the former White House counselor and fierce Trump loyalist, reported in her new book that she told Mr. Trump to accept his loss, something she did not say publicly at the time; even this much-delayed acknowledgment of reality drew a rebuke from Mr. Trump, who said she should “go back to her crazy husband.” […]
To Mr. Kushner, his father-in-law’s decision to turn once again to Mr. Giuliani was a red flag. As far as Mr. Kushner was concerned, Mr. Giuliani was an erratic schemer who had already gotten Mr. Trump impeached once because of his political intriguing in Ukraine, and nothing good would come of the former mayor’s involvement in fighting the election results. But instead of fighting Mr. Giuliani for Mr. Trump’s attention, Mr. Kushner opted out entirely, deciding it was time to focus on his own future, one that would no longer involve the White House.
He and Ms. Trump began making plans. They quickly ruled out returning to New York. Like Mr. Trump, who had officially become a Florida resident in 2019, they had soured on their former home just as it had soured on them. Miami, on the other hand, seemed exciting and new.
As strange as it seems, Jared and Ivanka represented sanity, which is a relative term after all, because when they left, enter the Kraken Krazies, Strikeforce Rudy, et. al.
While Mr. Trump huddled with Mr. Giuliani and others telling him that he could still win, Mr. Kushner and his wife began thinking about where they would live, what schools they could send their three children to and what business ventures they would pursue. They had to be discreet about it. The last thing they wanted to do was make it look as if they were moving on because that would produce headlines embarrassing to Mr. Trump. Indeed, Ivanka Trump would text her father’s top advisers that same day just after the election and prod them to “Keep the faith and the fight!”
It will come as no shock to you what happened next. Ivanka and hubby departed and since nature abhors a vacuum, who rushed in? Why, the fool Donald Trump, Jr., who else? And you know how desperate Trump had to be to call Junior, right?
The postelection fraud claims quickly exposed a rift within the Trump family. On the same day Mr. Kushner woke up to declare it was time to move to Miami, his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. was already pushing the president’s team to fight to stay in power. He sent a text to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, outlining a plan to override the verdict of the voters by having Republican legislatures in states won by Mr. Biden invalidate the results and send Electoral College votes for Mr. Trump when Congress counted them on Jan. 6.
How much Mr. Kushner knew about that at the time remains unclear, but he did not express serious concern about how far the effort to hang on to power would go. He sent word to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican majority leader, that Mr. Trump would eventually accept the reality that he lost.
“We’ll get through it, bear with us,” Mr. Kushner told Josh Holmes, a former chief of staff and campaign manager for Mr. McConnell who would pass along the message. “We’ve got a couple of challenges that have some merit, we’ll see how they go, but there’s a pretty good chance we come up short.” And once the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, he suggested, that would be the end of it. Mr. Trump just needed time to come to terms with his defeat.
While Mr. Kushner was often called the president’s shadow chief of staff, the man who held the actual title, Mr. Meadows, was actively encouraging the conspiracy theorists seeking to overturn the election, acting less as a gatekeeper than a door opener, letting practically anybody who wanted to come into the Oval Office.
Among them were lawyers and others arguing that Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally stop Mr. Biden from being formally recognized as the winner in his role overseeing the counting of the Electoral College votes in Congress. Mr. Pence concluded he had no such power and it would be unconstitutional for him to do so, but that did not stop Mr. Trump from keeping up the pressure.
Finally, seeing the collision that was coming, Marc Short, the vice president’s chief of staff, tried to enlist help from Mr. Kushner, calling him over the holidays to ask him to get his father-in-law to stand down. “Look, can you help us with this?” Mr. Short asked.
But Mr. Kushner brushed him off. “Look, when Rudy got involved, I stopped being involved,” he told Mr. Short. The vice president “is a big boy,” and if he disagreed with the president on a legal issue, he should bring in his lawyers. “I’m too busy working on Middle East peace right now, Marc.”
Yeah, don’t bother Jared, Marc, he’s too busy saving the planet. You save democracy on your own. You don’t have to be much of a prognosticator to realize how desperate Pence and Short were if they were turning to Kushner.
Then it got worse. Kevin McCarthy called Kushner.
After arriving home in the afternoon, Mr. Kushner was in the bathroom with the shower already running and about to jump in when his phone rang. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the House Republican minority leader, was on the line asking Mr. Kushner to persuade the president to do something. “We need help!” Mr. McCarthy insisted. Mr. Kushner turned off the shower and rushed to the White House.
Ivanka Trump had spent much of the day trying to keep her father from going too far. She had refused to address the rally on the Ellipse but at the last minute was so concerned by her father’s anger toward Mr. Pence that she decided to accompany him there in hopes of avoiding a worse clash. Over the following hours, as rioters rampaged through the Capitol, she ran up and down the stairs in the West Wing from her office to the Oval Office hoping to persuade her father to issue stronger statements calling off the attackers.
By the time Mr. Kushner finally arrived at the White House, his wife had gotten her father to release a video telling supporters to go home. But even then, he repeated his lies about the “fraudulent election” and expressed solidarity with the rioters, telling them, “We love you, you’re very special.” Mr. Kushner quickly concluded there was little more he could do at that point.
I think it’s fair to say that the videos that the January 6 Committee made of Kushner and Ivanka’s testimony will highlight and elaborate on a lot of what is outlined here. This should be a doozy. The Watergate tapes were bupkis compared to what we are about to hear, is my best guess.
I can tell it’s NYT. No other paper insists on using mr/mrs/ms for everyone.
Not many papers are so anxious to be accepted by the GOP, also.
The moment I get to tell every doomsayer how right I was on the possibility of too many of the players involved not getting away with much of anything draws nigh.
It was obvious that 45 & his henchmen weren’t & aren’t too smart to think they could actually get Pence to invalidate the election, when he did in fact not have the power to do that. They either didn’t & don’t believe that or are just plain ignorant, bottom line. Their greed for power outweighed their intelligence.
Jared “Oh look, there’s an iceberg ahead. Let’s get into a lifeboat before anyone else does”
On a side note: if all the idiots in Trumpton believe that Pence had the legal authority to deny the count, I wonder if they’ll still believe it when Kamala Harris is presiding?
The one thing that bothers me about this is the princess’s silence. You cannot tell me former guy would not listen to her. He might tell Kushner, Dimwit Jr. and Eric to go pee up a rope but I don’t think he would have dismissed Ivanka so easily/quickly. She had to know this and yet she merely sat on her thumb. I realize she was under no legal requirement to say bupkis to her father about the matter but she did have an opportunity and upon seeing how badly things were unfolding and STILL saying nothing…She is undeserving of any respect whatsoever. She most definitely can be accused of being complicit because of her silence.