Is Kushner next?

 

"Jared Kushner failed to disclose his role as a co-director of the Charles and Seryl Kushner Foundation from 2006 to 2015, a time when the group funded an Israeli settlement considered to be illegal under international law, on financial records he filed with the Office of Government Ethics earlier this year.

The latest development follows reports on Friday indicating the White House senior adviser attempted to sway a United Nations Security Council vote against an anti-settlement resolution passed just before Donald Trump took office, which condemned the structure of West Bank settlements. The failure to disclose his role in the foundation—at a time when he was being tasked with serving as the president’s Middle East peace envoy—follows a pattern of egregious omissions that would bar any other official from continuing to serve in the West Wing, experts and officials told Newsweek."  newsweek

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Syria is quiescent at the moment, North Korea hangs in the balance as a possible scenario for a major war.  Some people would like to steer me away from the subject of the Mueller investigation but the story is far too interesting for me to accept that.

I would think that Flynn's guilty plea is about developing leverage with regard to Kushner's oddness.

-  He did a poor job of filling out security clearance forms.  He did that repeatedly. Too good to obey the law?  I have filled out the same tedious forms many times and I can understand his reluctance, but, people can be hired to interview you and fill them out for you.

-  He thinks that he and his perfect group of experts (identities?) can bring the Palestinians and Israelis to an agreement over what I long ago came to see as a problem without a solution.  The difficulty is that the two groups' deeply felt desires and aims are mutually exclusive and not really subject to compromise.  The truth is that they both want ALL of the land between the sea and the Jordan River and in Israel's case a good many of them want a piece of Jordan as well.  Kushner will learn that both Bibi and the Palestinians are lying to him about their willingness to compromise.  But, his blindness to that is not a crime.  It is simply the result of his conceit and actual ignorance of these people.

-  IMO he is an agent of the Israeli state or the Jewish Agency who is unregistered under FARA.

-  It now appears that Kushner sent Flynn (perhaps the dumbest Irishman in the world - I am part Irish) to seek in the president elect's name Russian government cooperation in blocking a resolution at the UN that was unfavorable to Israel.  Did Trump know that Flynn was so dispatched or did Kushner take it upon himself to use his father in law's influence to send Flynn on this errand on behalf of a foreign state?  Is this a crime?  I know not as yet.  pl 

http://www.newsweek.com/jared-kushner-disclosure-form-west-bank-settlements-israel-white-house-729290

Comments

[Eric Newhill]

Sir,
It's hard to imagine anyone who carries water for Israel taking a big hit.

It will be interesting. Kushner's relationship with Trump makes him vulnerable - nay, a target - to Borgist machinations. His relationship with Israel should make him invulnerable to the same.

The Borg faces a quandary? Perhaps a rift in the Borg develops? I can't see Israel throwing Kushner under the bus and incurring Trump's wrath. I can't see Israel allowing it's name to be very publicly associated with underhanded behavior.

[The Beaver]

Colonel,

The irony: From the guy in charge of peace process in the Middle East

In addition, yesterday at the Saban17 Forum, Kushner described the Trump Middle East peace team as made up of "3 orthodox jews and a coptic Egyptian". Since Haim Saban was the moderator , he thanked the Whiz Kid for trying to derail UNSC resolution on settlements. "as far as I know there's nothing illegal there" he told Kushner.

Will try to locate the You Tube video and post it later on

[The Beaver]

Colonel

Another article :
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/1.826751

and the video of yesterday:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67y2V3ksdlA

[Alaric]

Well said:

"IMO he is an agent of the Israeli state or the Jewish Agency who is unregistered under FARA."

He also seems to lack any common sense when it comes to geopolitics. Him, Netanyahu, and MBS together.....oh my

[Yeah, Right]

"It's hard to imagine anyone who carries water for Israel taking a big hit"

I suspect it might be the reverse i.e. once someone does take a big hit then everyone who carries water for Israel will be in serious trouble.

Once the floodgates open there may be no stopping it.

[Keith Harbaugh]

Some sad news about Ireland (IMO):

"How Ireland Moved to the Left: ‘The Demise of the Church’ "
By LIAM STACK. 2017-12-02
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/02/world/europe/ireland-abortion-abuse-church.html

[outthere]

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: that wonderful Irish saying, you know, “Is this a private fight, or can anybody get into it?”
me too

[confusedponderer]

Eric Newhill,
I strongly doubt that Israel will 'throw Kushner under the bus'.

They won't be asked for their advice, view or preference in the matter whether Kushner is to stay in the whitehouse or whether he is to be kicked out. They have no saying in that matter, despite their considerable influence in the US.

IMO, what will count is simply domestic - that is, to what extent Kushner is a problem for Trump, and that'll be what solely counts in the question whether Kushner will get the boot or not.

It speaks for itself, in its own way, that the role and tasks of Kushner have been greatly reduced recently.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/jared-kushner-horizons-are-collapsing-within-the-west-wing

That's likely to for one to limit the damage the man can or could cause in addition to the damage he has caused, and, if there is someone else doing his former tasks, a boot won't create a great gap if he gets the kick.

So, why that reduction of Kushner's role, I wonder? Well, actually, I don't wonder. I daresay it's because what Kushner has advised as policy has and is gnawing at the reputation of Trump.

Trump by himself is, well, what he is, but in addition to the advice he got and likely still gets from Kushner he isn't exactly getting 'well considerated advice'.

Kushner's poor and ill advice is no problem for Israel, rather they see it as an advantage, but poor and ill policy resulting from such advice is a political and a poll problem for Trump. That IMO is all that'll count here.

Kushner was after all the genius recommending Trump to fire Comey, Kushner was responsible for 'middle east peace', and Kushner was rather friendly to the Saudis and all that.

Now, how well again did firing Comey do Trump? How far is that middle east peace? I haven't seen it yet. And what about the Saudis and what they do? What about Yemen and Quatar? In sum, all of that is hardly a series of successes, a series successes for America that is.

Pissing into Trumps policies Kushner may have done just what Israel and/or the Saudis wanted. But then: What for the US? Where is US, or, naturally, Trump's grand success based on Kushner's briliant advice? Is there any such succes?

Nope, there isn't anything like that and that's the problem for Kushner as an advisor and for Trump as well.

Firing Comey likely wasn't a wise thing to do, and middle east peace is far away, etc. pp. Trump may not be wise or smart but he probably understands when he is getting poor advice from Kushner.

Just to sum it up: ISIS is being kicked by the Syrians, Hezbollah, Iran and Russia - not by the US or Iraq, or by Turkey or Saudi Arabia. What a success. The Turks play their own 'post-NATO' games, with post-osmanian terriotorial ambitions and their support of so far by and large friendly sunni jihadis in Syria and likely in Lebanon. What a success.

The Israelis for their part don't succeed in 'breaking the Shia highway from Iran to Hezbollah', nor did they succeed in overthrowing Assad. What a success for America.

The Saudis, despite being absurdedly rich, cannot get their act together in Yemen. The Saudis got US backing, US aid in their siege of Yemen and likely they get US recce or air refuelling but still fail in Yemen, and fail also in getting Egypt or Pakistan doing the dirty work that the Saudis alone cannot do and fail doing when they try.

What the Saudis excel at in Yemen is besieging and blockading and blowing up a lot of things from the air. Oh yes, and then there is that nasty Cholera desease in Yemen with something like 400.000 being sick and some 2000 or so having died last time I looked.

Yemen's cholera is likely one of the worst human cathastrophies in recent time. The UN speaks of 'a cholera outbreak of unprecedented scale'.

http://www.who.int/dg/speeches/2017/security-council-yemen/en/

I suppose that for Saudis, Israelis and Kushner likely the cholera is ... hmm ... oh yes, it is Iran's and Houthi's fault and certainly not the fault of some neighbour blowing up water cleansing facilities, infrastructure, hospitals and/or bridges and the like ...

IMO if Kushner gets the boot, good riddance.

[Huckleberry]

While I like the Colonel's "Borg" notion, this all strikes me as ZOG.

[jdledell]

I've talked with Israelis who have met with David Friedman, the Trump bankruptcy lawyer, hard right Jew and now U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Quietly, he has told important Israelis to pay no attention to Kushner's ideas about Israel, the mideast, and a peace agreement but treat him nicely so not to P.O. Trump. The consensus is Kushner is in way over his head in many of his foreign affairs ideas.

[JohnH]

It is interesting that media reports leave out the purpose of Flynn's contacts with Russia. Had he just been upfront and said, "I contacted Russia on behalf of the Israeli lobby," I suspect that he would never have been fired or indicted...since violating the law on behalf of Israel seems not to be considered illegal.

[notlurking]

Never a good idea to have family members serving in government positions when you are the president...Daddy Trump does not want to hurt the feelings of darling Ivanka....

[Fred]

Keith,

Next time turn the bold off when you are done.

[Eric Newhill]

Yeah Right,
Well "everyone who carries water for Israel" would be, well, just about everyone. So, ok, maybe it's not totally Israel's call, but it sure will be the Borg's call. I agree that once they take the lid of that box, unspeakable furies will be released. So they won't.

Whatever Trump thinks of Kushner and whatever his loyalties may be (or not be), Trump isn't running the investigation. Mueller is. Mueller appears to be an assimilate. Ergo, I say that Kushner has nothing to worry about.

[FB Ali]

Keith Harbaugh,

For SST, the "sad news" is that you don't know how to close Bold Lettering after using it.

I would suggest you don't try such fancy stuff until you have discovered how to use it properly.

I have tried to close it off.

[Laura]

Trump is a micro-manager on stuff he thinks 1) he is interested in 2) might know something about and 3) affects him directly. There are actually very few people he interacts with...so it seems to me that if you are "White House," you are following Trump's dictates. Everyone is so afraid of ticking him off (legendarily nasty temper and abusiveness) that they just go with his flow.

Of course, this only works for a while...we may be coming up on the point at which it rather spectacularly stops working.

[WJ]

In my opinion Kushner will be passed over and the move will be directly against Teump on an obstruction of justice charge, which I believe is constitutionally-speaking an impossible charge to prosecute but which can and will be used to pressure Congress to open impeachment proceedings with the aim of either (1) actually removing Trump from office or (2) so thoroughly discrediting his administration that he loses all political wiggle room, esp on foreign policy and trade, for the remainder of his term. Are there enough neocon and establishment Republican types in Congress open to pursuing this? I don't know. There is little Trump can do at this point except to find a way of calling the FBI's bluff more convincingly than he has done, although the media's absolute refusal to do anything but parrot FBI/CIA talking points on the issue has made that task an almost impossible one to achieve. The whole damn FBI investigation into Flynn from the beginning must be shown to be thoroughly empty of real content and entirely politically motivated, as it is; but it is hard to show this when the entire narrative of corporate media has established (by the empty repetition of the same unsubstantiated assertions) that just the opposite is the case.

[confusedponderer]

... let's kill the bolding ;)

[confusedponderer]

Huckleberry,
likely it's more than the ZOG, but simply a grand-standing cross party consensus on nonsense.

Recently I almost spilled my coffe trying not to laugh loud when I read Trump's EPA head, iirc tellingly a guy from industry and a guy hostile to environmental protection, tell me and America why Trump kicking the Kyoto protocoll is a brilliant idea and won't harm the environment.

Why? Well, that's because, so he said, because American coal is very special and very different from the coal found on the rest of the world.

According to him, unlike the coal of the jealous rest of the world, American coal doesn't produce CO2 when being burnt, so it poses no environmental risk. And that the rest of the world only is jealous about that and they want to curb CO2 emissions only to harm America. See? No problem.

IMO that's a hard case of hard idiocy at work. If you don't like what science tells you, speak of 'fake news' and make it up as you like while you go along?

I had chemistry as a focus class in school and thus I very strongly doubt the assertion of the 'EPA head' on how special all that super American coal is.

But isn't that a brilliant leader for a enviromental protection agency? I'd bet that the advice from that genius is about as brilliant as what Kushner offers.

It is so idiotic that I even see the possibility of a Trumpian subversive destruction course: What I mean? Well, not filling so many agency seats is a deliberate policy IMO.

Deliberately don't fill open job slots at agencies, get rid of all these unwanted and unwilling scientists telling you all these bad things and have reliably hostile but reliably happy loons ruin an unwanted agency, to then close it 'because it doesn't work'?

[Adrestia]

stops the bold

[LondonBob]

Trump's mistake was not firing Comey sooner, and appointing Rosenstein, the idea Comey could have stayed on as FBI Director is fantastical.

[Dubhaltach]

In reply to Keith Harbaugh 04 December 2017 at 06:02 PM

Attempting to fix your HTML

Turning to the substance of your post. How is "How Ireland Moved to the Left: ‘The Demise of the Church’ " even remotely relevant to

My dad was born in 1960 and reared in 1960 - 1970s Catholic Ireland. His description of the viciousness with which the institutional church behaved is chilling. His description of the way in which children were beaten so savagely in the first school he attended that they needed several days to recover sufficiently to be physically capable of attending school is downright horrific. The way in which he and other Irish people of his generation describe the way in which the Catholic church actively promoted sectarianism is horrific. His entirely matter-of-fact description of how he personally was repeatedly singled out because his mother was a protestant is horrific. The revelations of institutionalised sexual abuse are horrific. The revelations of the suffering of children who underwent forced adoptions are horrific. The revelations of mass graves of orphans are horrific. The role of the Catholic hierarchy in preventing the introduction of a healthcare programme for low income children and their mothers at a time when in Ireland TB was killing Irish children in their droves is revolting. If ever there was an institution that illustrates the dictum that "absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely" the Catholic church in Ireland is it.

And you think the decline of the Catholic church's power in Ireland is a pity? In my private life I'm a conservative Catholic and I don't think the decline of the Catholic church's institutional power is a bad thing. On the contrary I think it's a very good thing. Fewer raped and abused children for a start. There was an Irish trade union leader called Jim Larkin who coined the slogan "You'll crucify Christ in this town no longer." conservative Catholic though I am I have to agree that he had a point.

Finally this pattern of institutionalised savagery wasn't just in Ireland. Ireland, Scotland, England and Wales, all have statutory Tribunals of Enquiry running at present and all of them are revealing the same pattern of systematic savagery and sexual abuse. From what I've read and been told by Americans whose word I trust the same appalling and revolting pattern is far from unknown in your country.

[John_Frank]

Was the decision to make contact with various foreign governments, including Russia, to seek to a delay in the UN SC vote on the Palestinian question illegal?

According to Professor Dershowitz, No.

If it was, what about what Reagan did with the Iranians while Carter was President, or what Carter did with Arafat, while Clinton was President?

Also, as others have noted, what about what Obama did in 2008 with Iran, Russia and Syria?

Returning to the topic at hand, what if one can show that Obama's decision making process was motivated by his personal animosity towards the Israeli Prime Minister?

An interview with Alan Dershowitz
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogation/2017/12/an_interview_with_alan_dershowitz_on_trump_and_the_mueller_investigation.html

That written, people may find the following piece by Byron York of interest:

Byron York: In Trump-Russia probe, was it all about the Logan Act?
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-in-trump-russia-probe-was-it-all-about-the-logan-act/article/2642434

If individuals within the outgoing administration deliberately contrived to start an investigation, based on an Act that is arguably no longer enforceable, by leaking highly classified intercepted communications, given everything else that has transpired, including allegations of corrupt practices within the Justice Department and the FBI concerning the conduct of the Hillary Clinton investigation and the Russian counter-intelligence investigation, (or if you prefer the Donald Trump investigation), Mr. Mueller's conflicts of interest and legitimate questions about his authority, a defendant with funds, who was determined to fight any allegation by Special Counsel, could quite possibly "tip the whole process over."

[LeaNder]

let's close this.

[confusedponderer]

LB,
well, I think I disagree.

IMO Comey was a problem because he investigated things that Trump didn't want to get public and didn't weant to see investigated.

My point is this:

I simply assume there were things Trump didn't want to see investigated or discussed openly, and that's why and how Comey became a problem for Trump.

It's IMO not that Comey was evil or vile or a nasty democrat, but that it was the nasty things he was looking at and into.

Was not Paul John Manafort, Trump's campaign manager, engaged in doing odd policy things in Ukraine and getting money for that from ukie oligarchs? Assuming that the oligarchs likely got that money not entirely legally, it suggests that that was something that was unwanted to get public. And so on.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/us/politics/paul-manafort-russia-trump.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/paul-manafort-ukraine-donald-trump.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/10/30/who-did-manafort-and-gates-work-for-in-ukraine-and-russia/

Or how did Trump get all that money to build all these golf sites when banks were down? That wasn't cheap. And then banks were not lending money, and Trump had a bad rep for being banktrupt a few times - so who did lend him money? And so on.

That's the sort of things I assume Trump didn't want to see investigated or being talked about publicly.

Kicking out Comey was saying: "Oh, well, why not let us talk about something else and do that quickly?