President Trump directed his then-chief of staff John Kelly to “get rid of” his daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner, both advisers to the president, from the White House, according to a forthcoming book.
“Get rid of my kids; get them back to New York,” the president told Kelly, author Vicky Ward reports in “Kushner Inc.,” which is set to be released March 19.
Trump grew frustrated that his daughter and Kushner “didn’t know how to play the game” and sparked bad press, according to the New York Times, which reported the contents of the book.
Kelly told the president it would be hard to fire his family members, but the two agreed to make life difficult for them in hopes that it would encourage them to resign.
The president’s daughter and her husband still work at the White House and Kelly exited his post at the end last year. The two initially supported Kelly’s hiring.
“Kushner Inc.” seeks to show how Ivanka Trump and Kushner gained power in the White House during the last two years. Kushner worked for Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the couple moved to Washington, D.C. from New York to take unpaid jobs in the White House.
A spokesman for Kushner’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, dismissed the book as fiction.
“Every point that Ms. Ward mentioned in what she called her ‘fact checking’ stage was entirely false,” Peter Mirijanian said in a statement. “It seems she has written a book of fiction rather than any serious attempt to get the facts. Correcting everything wrong would take too long and be pointless.”
Ward fired back: “I will simply say that the 220 people I interviewed for the book might beg to disagree.”
[Also read: Trump pressured staff to grant Ivanka a security clearance]
To Abbe Lowell’s claim that I have written a “book of fiction” and that “correcting everything wrong would take too long and be pointless,” I will simply say that the 220 people I interviewed for the book might beg to disagree. https://t.co/5tDQMQsRUc #KushnerInc
— Vicky Ward (@VickyPJWard) March 12, 2019
