Looks like Donald Trump is trying to shove Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump out the White House back door
Over the weekend, Robert Mueller made a flurry major moves in the Trump-Russia scandal, against everyone from Rick Gates and Paul Manafort to the Russians. Then on Monday, Mueller made clear through the media that his next move is about to be against Jared Kushner. In what is probably not a coincidence, it looks like Trump is now trying to shove Kushner (and Ivanka) out the White House back door.
By now we’ve all figured out why the Trump White House bent over backward to try to cover up the Rob Porter domestic violence scandal. They didn’t want it to come out that Porter’s past meant that he had been working without a permanent security clearance, because so many other people – including Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump – hadn’t been able to obtain proper security clearances either. The scandal came out anyway, and on Friday, John Kelly made a move to try make the scandal go away.
Kelly announced that by this upcoming Friday, every White House employee who has spent several months trying and failing to obtain a permanent security clearance will be fired. This is surreal, because as Rachel Maddow pointed out on-air last night, this means that Kelly just announced the imminent firing of Jared and Ivanka. Because this move is being made for PR reasons, Kelly could easily have framed the parameters differently so that Jared and Ivanka aren’t affected by it. But instead he’s very clearly including them in the group of people he says he’s about to fire. Kelly is on such thin ice that he likely wouldn’t even try something like this without Donald Trump’s approval.
So now we’re facing two key questions here. First, will Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump actually be forced to resign from the White House this Friday? Second, is this Donald Trump’s way of getting Kushner out of the building, at a time when Robert Mueller is clearly targeting Kushner for a plea deal against Trump? Trump is so tepid with these things, it could end up going nowhere. But this doesn’t feel like a coincidence. Stay tuned.
