Proof of Collusion by Seth Abramson

Author:Seth Abramson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Annotated History

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Nevertheless, within forty-eight hours of Trump’s November 8, 2016, election, Michael Flynn—who has no official role in the transition and has been denied a White House position by transition head Chris Christie—is cleared to contact Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s government without involvement by the State Department. It is unknown who gave him permission to make the contact. By the next day, at the direction of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Christie has been fired from the presidential transition team; he will openly speculate that his objection to Flynn’s participation in the transition was a primary cause of his dismissal.

According to the Washington Examiner, Jared Kushner’s involvement in the firing of Christie was partly motivated by Christie’s role in the prosecution of Jared’s father, Charles Kushner.127

Trump went to extraordinary lengths to have Kushner named as one of his top advisers; to avoid anti-nepotism laws, Trump had to get an advisory opinion from the Department of Justice declaring the White House exempt from such regulations.128 Kushner spent the transition period building up his political capital in preparation for his new White House role, and his “purge” of the transition team, as the New York Times called it, was one of his first steps in further solidifying his position within Trump’s political orbit.129 The Times wrote in November 2016, “Both [former congressman Mike Rogers and defense and foreign policy adviser Matthew Freedman] were part of what officials described as a purge orchestrated by Jared Kushner. Mr. Kushner, a transition official said, was systematically dismissing people like Mr. Rogers who had ties with Mr. Christie.”130 It was Christie’s successful prosecution of Charles Kushner that had led indirectly to Jared Kushner’s disastrous, nearly financially ruinous decision to purchase 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City; the purchase was Kushner’s first major one after his father was incarcerated and Kushner took over Kushner Companies.131 According to NBC News, ever since the purchase of the property at 666 Fifth Avenue, Kushner Companies had been “bleeding money.”

Several months after Trump’s inauguration, around the time that Saudi Arabia’s blockade on Qatar began, Charles Kushner met with the Qatari finance minister to discuss funding for 666 Fifth Avenue, a decision he later said was the “wrong thing to do.” Kushner defended his decision to attend the meeting, however, by saying that he met with the Qatari simply to tell him that he couldn’t accept any funding from Qatar while his son was assisting with U.S.-Qatar policy in the White House. When asked by Business Insider why he didn’t simply refuse the meeting in the first instance if he didn’t intend to take any money from the Qataris, Kushner had no answer—except to agree that doing so would have been the right thing to do.132

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