Weakened, Kushner goes it alone in Mexico
BY TINA NGUYEN
MARCH 8, 2018 12:00 PM
... His .. role as shadow secretary of state was curtailed with the arrival of .. John Kelly, and his .. profile has been blackened by .. the Mueller probe. More recently, he lost .. ally Josh Raffel, his personal media flack and crisis manager, and was stripped of the interim security clearance that had allowed him to pursue his farcically expansive White House portfolio, which has included overhauling the government’s information technology; reforming the criminal-justice system; fixing the V.A.; addressing the opioid crisis; leading Trump’s infrastructure plan; and securing peace in the Middle East. A series of recent reports .. suggests that .. investigators are interested in whether Kushner has been a target of foreign intelligence, and whether his business ties had influenced his decisions during the transition and in the White House. In Mar-a-Lago last weekend, Trump .. surveyed .. guests on how .. Kushner’s .. press was playing out.
... Kushner’s Wednesday .. trip to Mexico appears to have been .. less well received than usual. “He is very weakened, and he is going to get weaker,” Agustín Basave, a senior lawmaker in the Party of the Democratic Revolution, told Reuters. “More than anything, what he comes to say here will be contradicted by Trump the next day.” A senior U.S. official explained that the trip was meant to smooth tensions .. after a .. Trump-Peña Nieto phone call had derailed .. another .. summit. But while Kushner apparently had a good meeting with .. Luis Videgaray .. the First Son-in-Law’s presence rankled other .. officials. As The New York Times reports, the trip was announced with .. one day’s warning, and without .. public disclosure about what would be discussed. One senior diplomat told Reuters .. officials were “taken by surprise by the visit and frustrated they were not informed.”
... it would have been prudent to have someone in the room with knowledge of Latin American politics, said Christopher Sabatini ... “This is not the way foreign policy normally is, or should be, conducted,” he told the The New York Times ...
... After decades of diplomatic work to forge a tighter bond between the U.S. and Mexico, Trump has quickly driven a wedge between the two ...
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2018/03/jared-kushner-goes-it-alone-in-mexico
= new reply since forum marked as read
