Ivanka Trump has a whole new problem
Earlier today, Donald Trump announced that he’ll refuse to honor the House Oversight Committee’s request for documents relating to Jared Kushner’s security clearance. At the time, Palmer Report said that Trump had just unwittingly taken the bait, because he was opening the door for it to become a much bigger scandal that would get a lot more media attention. But even we didn’t see something this big coming this soon: it turns out it’s all about Ivanka.
Donald Trump also pressured former top White House officials John Kelly and Don McGahn to grant Ivanka Trump a security clearance, after they recommended against giving her such a clearance, according to new reporting from CNN. This means that, by definition, Kelly and McGahn thought Ivanka was some kind of security risk to the United States. No, really.
So now we know that the Jared Kushner security clearance scandal is also an Ivanka Trump security clearance scandal. No wonder Donald Trump is trying to fight so hard against the details of this scandal surfacing. It’s not just that Trump improperly ordered that Jared and Ivanka be given security clearances. It’s that there are unknown specific reasons why Kelly and McGahn thought Jared and Ivanka were security risks. If investigators get their way, we’re going to find out precisely what those reasons were.
The kicker is that even if Donald Trump’s White House illegally ran the John Kelly and Don McGahn memos through a shredder a long time ago, it’s nearly a given that Kelly and McGahn still have copies of their own memos. They’re both widely reported to already be cooperating with Robert Mueller. The House Judiciary Committee just asked them both to turn over all relevant documents. Our guess is this Ivanka-Jared security risk scandal is going to surface very soon.
