Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner faced little scrutiny on his way to becoming one of America’s most powerful people. But now a row over White House security clearances is pushing the president’s publicity-shy favourite into unwelcome limelight.
Unlike his can’t-get-enough-exposure father-in-law, Kushner is a discreet presence.
He’s virtually a ghost on social media, where he has 77,000 Twitter followers but doesn’t tweet.
And in the White House, he may be a fixture at high-level meetings, but he’ll rarely speak if the press corps is present, waiting until journalists leave the room.
So it was a measure of the White House’s need for damage control that Kushner went on the Trump go-to channel Fox News late Monday to dismiss concerns over his security access.
“I’ve been accused of all different types of things, and all of those things have turned out to be false. We’ve had a lot of crazy accusations,” Kushner said on Fox’s “The Ingraham Angle.”
Controversy over Kushner’s access to top secrets has been brewing since the start of the Trump presidency. After all, he was a relatively unknown quantity in Washington — a man with no political or diplomatic experience, or previous vetting, but a ton of potentially tangled business dealings at home and abroad.
This week the issue blew up when a veteran White House bureaucrat told Congress that her department had been overruled by higher-ups to grant passes to 25 people initially rejected due to worries over conflicts of interest, foreign influence and personal problems.
Among the names that the Democrat-led congressional committee investigating the issue suggests may be on that list: Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump
Source: Guardian Newspaper.
