Come on, people, now, smile on your brother

 

Feel like I need to start following Insta to keep up with Hakeem's extraordinary color choices when he's filming in Brooklyn, also see below. Could change hearts and minds, or even my own wardrobe. 

I'm a little surprised that nobody seems to have come up with the thing that seemed obvious to me about the meeting between Trump son-in-law and crime associate Jared Kushner and the House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries some weeks ago, in a story Kushner appears to have leaked for a New York Times story by Maggie Haberman and Annie Karni that appeared on Sunday: that Trump sent Kushner to set up a meeting where he could explore the possibility of bribing Jeffries to block House efforts to impeach the president when Jeffries becomes Speaker in January.

Not likely with cash, but more probably with Trump concessions on legislation Jeffries would like to pass on housing or immigration or the Democrats' "affordability" agenda, making the Times story somewhat truthful—they really did talk about the subjects reported, but I'm speculating they also talked about other stuff.

That certainly fits in better with the Trumpian proclivities than the alternative as reported, that it was a pure policy discussion, backed by the evidence that the two men "have a relationship" from eight years ago, when  Congress was working on the bipartisan First Step prison reform bill, of which Jeffries was the main House Democratic sponsor, and Kushner was its lobbyist in the White House, convincing Trump the bill,  wasn't too "soft on crime" (he's said to have favored it himself in recollection of his criminal father's time in the federal pen). And the prospect of impeachment following expected Republican losses in the coming election is something Trump's been preoccupied with all year:

AI Experiment

Karoline Leavitt's response to the reporter's question as to how the White House decided Jared Kushner's involvement in all the Middle East negotiations was appropriate kind of triggered me:

It may be frankly, but it's not despicable. It's what we call *normal*. The reporter isn't suggesting it's inappropriate, he's presupposing that any normal person would regard it as inappropriate prima facie.

[image or embed]

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) July 22, 2026 at 8:40 PM

But am I right on that? Is it really prima facie inappropriate? It seems obvious to me and my Bluesky pals, but then of course I and they don't like Trump or Kushner. We think they're horrible and criminal malefactors. So we could be biased.

So I thought I could put it to an LLM test: If I put it to Google's Gemini as a pure hypothetical case, the way they do in in law school, at least in the movies I've seen, without any names, what would it say?

suppose the president of a country invites his son-in-law to join a diplomatic negotiating team dealing with parties some of whom have given the son-in-law's investment firm billions of dollars, while the other parties haven't given him anything. Is that appropriate?

The LLM responded, and I'll give you the whole thing, in the purest LLM style (note the em-dashed parenthetical and the bullet list):

Where's the Victim?

 

You probably won't believe this but this guy heads one of America's 2 major political parties. pic.twitter.com/FtdRnkVrhm

— Ron Shillman (@shillman1) December 12, 2023

I'm feeling a nagging dissatisfaction with the conduct of the New York lawsuit against Trump, his older sons, and the family business over the flagrant fraudulence of their financial "disclosures", which report wildly exaggerated values for their assets as a way of getting banks and insurance companies to get them better rates than they could otherwise get.

It's not anything wrong with the case, or any likelihood that New York will lose the case, I'm feeling very cheerful about that, but the way Trump and his attorneys seem to be playing the publicity war: 

In defiant and rambling testimony on [November 7], Trump acknowledged that his asset valuations were sometimes inaccurate but said they were not relevant to banks and insurers.

Trump's lawyer Christopher Kise built on that argument on Thursday, saying banks that did business with the Trump Organization profited from the loans.

"There's no victim. There's no complainant. There's no injury. All of that is established now,” Kise said. (Reuters)

And all the New York lawyers can say is response is that they don't have to prove there was a victim. Or the statutes were the victims ("I would just basically point out," Judge Engoron said, "that the mere fact that the lenders were happy doesn't mean that the statute wasn't violated. It doesn't mean other statutes weren't violated.") "Help, I'm being violated!" cried § 175.10. Which is no doubt true from the legal standpoint, but it's just an awful look. No harm, no foul, right? If the banks are happy with it, where's the harm?

Can't we please come up with a better argument than that?

For the Record: Miller Bringing Back the "China Virus"

 

Trump sold foreign policy to the PRC for less than $20K. https://t.co/hBnMdg0KZR pic.twitter.com/jtvEr4MclF

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 15, 2022

Because he didn't think it was going to be that serious, except sometimes. pic.twitter.com/d4DLPsc0qX

— Yas We Can (@Yastreblyansky) November 15, 2022

Narratology: Jared the Spy

Photo by Jonathan Ernst/Reuters via The Times (UK).

I realize there's an awful lot to think about at the moment, but this week-old piece by the estimable Vicky Ward (author of the 2019 Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump), really shouldn't be allowed to wash away in the flood.

It offers a very plausible account, based on Ward's own sources, of exactly what the Saudi Arabian sovereign wealth fund was paying for with their $2 billion investment in Jared Kushner's new investment firm, in the context of a power struggle that had been going on in the kingdom since early 2015, when King Salman, who had been king for just three months, appointed his nephew Mohammed bin Nayef (MbN) as crown prince, and his own son, Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) as deputy crown prince; namely, alleging that Kushner conspired with MbS to get him named crown prince and MbN thrown in prison in 2017, including by passing him classified material to which he had access thanks to the security clearance Trump insisted on giving him.

Which would make him guilty of more than just a Foreign Agents Registration Act violation, if true (Kushner has denied passing classified material to anybody)—like espionage, or the "espionage lite" of Section 951, in which

Hot Seat

Image by vicnt (Getty Images/Stockphoto), via ETF Trends.

Well, well, well:

WASHINGTON — 

The Senate Intelligence Committee has sent a bipartisan letter to the Justice Department asking federal prosecutors to investigate Stephen K. Bannon, a former Trump confidante, for potentially lying to lawmakers during its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

The letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The [Los Angeles] Times, was signed by the panel’s then-chairman, Republican Sen. Richard M. Burr, and its ranking Democrat, Sen. Mark Warner.

It also raised concerns about testimony provided by family members and confidants of President Trump that appeared to contradict information provided by a former deputy campaign chairman to Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Those it identified as providing such conflicting testimony were the president’s son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks.

"Has sent" actually about 13 months ago, to prosecutor Deborah Curtis in the DC US attorney's office (who transferred to Commerce Department in September 2019). DOJ didn't tell the paper what action they had or hadn't taken up to now.

The "former deputy campaign chairman" is Paul Manafort's right-hand man Rick Gates, who cooperated with Mueller and took a plea. Among other things,

Fuq the Blues, They Don't Vote For Us

Illumination ca, 1413-15 by the Boucicault Master, Paris, depicting the Roman emperor Galerius "on his deathbed, suffering from a horrendous malady that reportedly caused his entrails to decay inside his body and worms to come out of his mouth, ears, and nose... as two servants cover their mouths from the stench of his rotting flesh." J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

In March 1992, Ed Koch, the former New York City mayor, wrote that Baker had dismissed concern about Jewish anger [over G.H.W. Bush administration demands that Israel join Madrid peace process], saying “F*** the Jews, they don’t vote for us.” Baker adamantly denied it.

Fred Zeidman, a Houston-area businessman and Republican fundraiser who is friendly with the Bush family and with Baker, said the remark has long been misunderstood. Baker was aiming his ire at another Cabinet member, Zeidman said, and intended it as a joke. (JTA, December 2018)

Meaning, of course, Baker really did say it, and providing evidence that calling your racism a "joke" is an old Republican habit, but let that pass. Nowadays Republican politicians demand lockstep fealty to the Israeli government, but most American Jews don't agree, and so they still don't vote for them. So it goes.

Meanwhile, the latest outrage is the revelation, in a terrific piece by Katherine Eban for Vanity Fair ("How Jared Kushner's Secret Testing Plan 'Went Poof Into Thin Air'"), that the coronavirus response team of business bros convened at the White House by Jared Kushner had managed by early April to put together a plausible proposal for a national Covid testing plan to coordinate distribution of test kits and contact tracing, beef up antibody testing, and report all test data directly to a national repository as well as state and local authorities, but ditched it under the impression that only Democrats were really suffering from the disease so it wasn't worth the trouble, because it really looked like a lot of work, and besides the virus might just disappear (according to models pushed by Dr. Birx), and

More on Kushner

Thanks for the shoutout, Tengrain!

NewYork, uncredited stock photo via Financial Times.

A rather rich person, owner of a couple of Lower Manhattan boutique hotels, once told my wife the secret of getting rich: You have to be able to entirely ignore the content of whatever it is you're doing, the product if your business is producing something, in favor of the bottom line. I naturally thought, what a sad approach to one's livelihood, how like starving oneself.

Then, the things that former Observer publisher Jared Kushner is not interested in, by former Observer editor Kyle Pope:

MOST WEEKS, KUSHNER NOT ONLY DIDN’T READ the Observer, he didn’t appear to read anything else, either. I never knew him to discuss a book, a play, or anything else that was in the Observer’s cultural wheelhouse. His circle of friends was fairly limited, largely tech executives and other successful business people, a smattering of celebrities, and a coterie of much older successful men, people like Rupert Murdoch, financier Ron Perelman, and the public relations impresario Howard Rubenstein.

Even politics seemed to lie outside his area of interest. Every week, Kushner and I held a conference call with the Observer’s editorial writer, who would pitch ideas for the paper’s two main editorial slots. These ideas usually touched on state, local, or national politics. Kushner almost never showed any interest in what tended, at the time, to be the hottest and most pressing issues of the day.

What he wanted The Observer for was to serve as a "bullhorn for his own financial interests", Pope thought, a vehicle for rewarding allies by putting their names in annual lists of the "top people" in New York real estate, and commissioning "hit pieces" against refractory bankers who balked at giving him loans, but mostly just to establish his general valuableness as a person who gets talked about in a positive way, which is always good for business. Central to that was that the paper should be seen as a financial success, compromised by the way he chose to make it one, by saving money on writers, whom he regarded as incomprehensible annoyances:

Charles

Via.

Via Yahoo:

President Donald Trump praised his administration’s work on the coronavirus pandemic as “incredible” on Monday despite repeated missteps, including long delays in dispensing test kits. Then he attempted to shift the blame to a nameless “somebody” from “a long time ago.” 

“There has been so much unnecessary death in this country,” Trump said, adding:

“It could have been stopped and it could have been stopped short, but somebody a long time ago, it seems, decided not to do it that way. And the whole world is suffering because of it.”

My thoughts were drawn irresistibly to a famous story by Shirley Jackson, "Charles", which if you don't know it already, please read it now at the link, because it's one of those old-school commercial stories (in Mademoiselle in 1948) that depend on a twist, and there will be a spoiler in a moment.

Vignette From the Age of Covid

Ooh Mark, Jared saw you crying and told Maggie about it and now ALL the girls know Donald said he might ask for his ring back https://t.co/RL7KKbXufu

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 16, 2020

Maggie Haberman, 16 April, on the first three weeks of the president's new chief of staff:

In the case of Mr. Meadows, it has not helped him with his White House colleagues that the former North Carolina congressman, who has a reputation for showing his emotions, cried while meeting with members of the White House staff on at least two occasions. One instance was in the presence of a young West Wing aide; another time was with the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

On both occasions, Mr. Meadows was discussing staffing changes, according to the people briefed on the events. A White House spokesman declined to comment on either meeting. A person close to Mr. Kushner said he denied that any such episode involving him ever took place.

I'm not going to try writing it up as a scene, but I can't stop picturing it as a lockdown moment that should be part of the history, a Skype call between Haberman in her Washington apartment and Jared and Ivanka on a couch somewhere, maybe still in Jersey—they flew to the Bedminster golf course for the first Passover seder, with their Secret Service friends and presumably hundreds of freshly rented golf carts, and it must have been a pretty idyllic moment of respite, unspoiled by any golf or First Golfer raging through the clubhouse. Jared's regaling Maggie with tales of weeping Mark, and they're laughing their little hearts out, and then Ivanka raises a warning finger: "Of course Jared denies that any such episode involving him ever took place." And then they're laughing harder than ever.

Notes from the commentariat continued

Eli Valley's Passover cartoon (Gut yom tov!) featuring Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss.

Then there was Mr. Bret Stephens, complaining about how Big Government is stopping folks from feeding children ("Covid-19 and the Big Government Problem"):

Katie Wilson, a deputy under secretary at the Department of Agriculture in the Obama administration, is the executive director of the Urban School Food Alliance, a nonprofit that works with the country’s largest school districts to improve the quality of student nutrition. Her topmost concern is with the millions of poorer children and their families for whom school meals are essential to diets and budgets alike.

In this pandemic, she has a message for government bureaucrats in Washington and every state capital: Stop getting in the way.

Note how he makes the Urban School Food Alliance sound like some nice little private thing, "a nonprofit", as opposed to a nonprofit institution that is a pretty big slice of government in its own right, a confederation of (not "with") the nation's 12 largest school districts with an almost billion-dollar budget used to "leverage our purchasing power to continue to drive food quality up and costs down while incorporating sound environmental practices."

Hugh and Cry

Kids, nobody WANTS to have Dunning-Kruger. Don't judge the poor guy. https://t.co/F2iwZMvuPg

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 9, 2020

Photograph by Alex Brandon/AP and whatever bright spark at WaPo picked it out doesn't wish Jared well, because it looks like he's drowning and can't figure out which direction the air is in.

Shorter Hugh Hewitt, "Jared Kushner doesn't deserve this withering barrage" (age cannot wither him, nor custom stale his infinite variety, but barrages might):

After all, even liberal New York mayor Bill de Blasio thanked him for the 200,000 N95s the feds provided New York with last week. Why is everybody else so darn mean? Probably because Democrats are afraid we'll have a V-shaped economic recovery when the medication and the vaccine come out and they'll lose in November. Shame on them for politicizing this national emergency!

Actually, you're the one who brought the elections into it, Huey.

Also, de Blasio had asked for 3.3 million N95 masks and 15,000 ventilators. Some 400 immediately needed ventilators seem to have arrived too, from those provided by the feds to the state, along with 140 from Oregon governor Kate Brown and apparently more out of the 1000 that Jack Ma and associates donated to the state. The New England Patriots had done better than Kushner's task force, providing 300,000 masks. After de Blasio issued his thanks to the president and his Pooh-Bah, the government released another 600,000 masks, proving that Trump's remarks to governors on 24 March applied to mayors as well:

President Donald Trump says he’s willing to help blue-state governors who are struggling to contain coronavirus outbreaks — but only if they’re willing to stop criticizing him in exchange.

“It’s a two-way street,” Trump told Fox News on Tuesday. “They have to treat us well, also. They can’t say, ‘Oh, gee, we should get this, we should get that.’”

As usual, Trump isn't really hiding anything. He makes deals with his hostages, and expects you to live up to your end. Then he says, "See, President Zelenksyy said he didn't feel any pressure at all," or

“I’ll tell you who’s been nice, Mayor de Blasio,” Trump said in a tone of surprise. “He understands what we’ve given him.”

But there aren't any medications out there that are going to turn around the economy in a U, V, or W in the next six months, and there definitely won't be a vaccine before 2021. I hope we're well on the road to recovery in the fall, but I don't think the economy is going to be the main issue this year.

Literary Corner: Our Bodies, Our Shelves

Via GlobalBiodefense.com.

Stockpile

by Donald J. Trump

We have a stockpile. It is a
federal stockpile. We can use it
for states, or we can use it for ourselves.

We do use it for the federal government.
We have a very big federal government.

This is apparently a comment on Jared Kushner's interesting statement explaining why the federal stockpile of medical products shouldn't be distributed to the states that need them:

"The notion of the federal stockpile was it's supposed to be our stockpile. It's not supposed to be states' stockpiles that they then use," he said. "So we're encouraging the states to make sure that they're assessing the needs, they're getting the data from their local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we've given them."

Which seemed so peculiar, because, you know, where is the place that isn't in the states where it's meant to go?

Not necessarily doing something nefarious, but how would you know?

Sterling is closed (as you'd imagine) until at least 30 April. Is he going out there on his own or with some "friends" and his $45,000 worth of golf carts to an otherwise closed course, like Chris Christie going to the beach during the government shutdown of July 2017? Will there be caddies, and will the kitchen at the 19th hole open up to prepare snacks?

Why is my first thought about the money?

For the Record

This seems so much worse, and somehow sadder, than anything we're screaming at Maggie Haberman for doing:

This story is a truly remarkable effort to demonstrate that Trump has "empathy" and may intend to "do something" about the opioid crisis. https://t.co/ww9troaLEl

— Amazing!o (@Yastreblyansky) August 8, 2019

The president hardly seems involved in the story at all pic.twitter.com/OdsH5y0JZv

— Amazing!o (@Yastreblyansky) August 8, 2019

So that it reads like a specific assignment--"Demonstrate how Donald came by his passionate commitment to combat drug abuse"--for which the reporter was basically unable to find any material, though there are thousands of very interesting words.

— Amazing!o (@Yastreblyansky) August 8, 2019

West of Eden: Surrender Documents

Jews and Palestinians sharing the street at the Jaffa Gate in Old Jerusalem before World War I, via +972.

This is making it pretty explicit:

The famous Jared Kushner "peace plan", part of which the White House unveiled a sketchy picture of over the weekend, isn't a settlement but a surrender in which Palestinians are being asked to permanently abandon their claims of nationhood in return for something more than $25 billion (but much less than the $50 billion you'll see in the headlines, since almost half of that is devoted to funding projects in Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan) in bribe money over ten years, ponied up not by Israel or the United States but by the "wealthy Gulf states and nations in Europe and Asia, along with private investors" who should be represented at the formal rollout in Manama, Bahrain, this week—no Palestinians, who are boycotting the conference, will be there, and no Israelis either; since they have no obligations under the proposal, why should they bother?

Nor will the "regional business leaders" the plan depends on, according to the Washington Post. Why wouldn't they want to invest a billion dollars in Gaza and West Bank tourism? Well, there's not going to be an airport for the West Bank, and the only internal options are buses, shared taxis, or a dicey experience with a rental car:

Designed Failure

Uncredited installation art illustrating "Zero Tolerance", from 7 May, AP Photo/Susan Walsh.

More on Wonder Boy Jared Kushner and his fabulous immigration plan, from Politico:

Kushner has been talking up his immigration plan with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, which detractors have derided as laughably simplistic. In the version he debuted to lawmakers on Tuesday, the slides showed circles placed next to each other representing different potential immigration reforms and flags denoting “peer nations” that have adopted merit-based immigration systems such as Canada, Australia and Japan, according to two Republicans who have viewed the presentation.

The Washington Post coverage notes who the people were who stepped in when he couldn't answer questions: Stephen Miller—

At times, Miller jumped in to assist Kushner, especially on questions about how the plan would deal with low-skilled workers. “Miller interrupted him a lot,” the individual said.

The same problems plague the Middle East peace plan, the Politico report says,

More Than Mere Anarchy

Couldn't find a decent illustration for "mere anarchy", which has been taken over by Woody Allen and Moby (in separate efforts), but here's a fabulous widening gyre, by Hiroshige.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, introduces his version of a take we'll be hearing a lot of, I'm sure, on the Mueller Report ("The Mueller Exposé")

Roughly four thousand, two hundred and twenty-seven Trump-era news cycles ago, there was a rather famous book called “Fire and Fury.” The author, Michael Wolff, used an interesting tactic to gain access to the Trump White House: He allowed his subjects, the president included, to believe that he was going to write a positive account of the Trump administration, and then used that access to produce an account of an administration in constant chaos, and a president who was understood by everyone around him to be unfit for the job.

One way to approach the Mueller report, if your sense of civic duty requires you to approach it, is to see it as a more rigorous, capacious version of “Fire and Fury.” Mueller's exposé was backed by subpoena power rather than just sweet talk, but ultimately it delivers the same general portrait: Donald Trump as an amoral incompetent surrounded by grifters, misfits and his own overpromoted children, who is saved from self-destruction by advisers who sometimes decline to follow orders, and saved from high crimes in part by incompetence and weakness.

Sure he's disgusting, but his quick-witted staff (as opposed to the corrupt staff that "surrounds" him, apparently he's got both) stops him from committing all the crimes he's inclined to commit, so we ought to be able to live with that for another four years. And what an "interesting" unethical slob that Michael Wolff was, allowing Trump to think he was going to tell comforting lies about the president when he was secretly planning to tell the truth the whole time. Now let's get back to the horse race!

Less information for you and me, more information for whoever Jared writes to

In my email, from Foreign Policy:

Trump to Cease Reporting Drone Deaths Top News: U.S. President Donald Trump has revoked a 2016 Obama-era executive order which required intelligence officials to publish the number of civilians killed in drone strikes outside of designated war zones, in places such as Libya, Yemen, and Pakistan. The requirements were a bid to increase transparency around drone strikes, which increased ten-fold under Barack Obama. U.S. President Donald Trump looks to be on course to exceed that, launching substantially more drone strikes than Obama did in his first two years in office. The Trump administration described the rule as “superfluous” and “distracting.”

But at least Trump can be relied on not to use improper methods of email storage, since he doesn't know how to use email, what better assurance could you have, though I guess we can't say that for Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump, and Stephen Miller—you don't suppose they'd ever send classified information to the wrong places, do you?

Keep your eye on the timeline, redux

Via boundary2.

Christopher Christie, in contrast, is not being wholly candid in his own superbly subtitled memoir, Let Me Finish: Trump, the Kushners, Bannon, New Jersey, and the Power of In-Your-Face Politics, as reported by Maggie Haberman:

On Feb. 14, 2017, Mr. Christie and his wife, Mary Pat, had lunch scheduled with the president. It happened to be the day after Mr. Flynn — whom Mr. Christie did not back for the national security adviser role — was dismissed for lying to the vice president about his contacts with the Russian ambassador during the transition. Mr. Kushner decided to attend.

As Mr. Kushner tucked into his “typical salad,” Mr. Christie wrote, the president said to him, “This Russia thing is all over now, because I fired Flynn.” Mr. Christie said that he started laughing, and the president asked why.

“‘Sir,’ I said, ‘this Russia thing is far from over,’” Mr. Christie wrote. Mr. Trump responded: “What do you mean? Flynn met with the Russians. That was the problem. I fired Flynn. It’s over.” Mr. Kushner added, “That’s right, firing Flynn ends the whole Russia thing.”

Which looks at first sight like evidence of Trump's attempts to obstruct the investigation, but that's not at all what the ex-governor meant to suggest, heavens no: