Ivanka gets a pass

On Aug. 16, 2016, just a few weeks after his father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, had clinched the Republican nomination for president, Esquire magazine ran a story entitled “Jared Kushner’s Second Act.” It was written by veteran journalist Vicky Ward and exposed a number of less-than-flattering details about the then 35-year-old head of his family’s real-estate firm, Kushner Companies.

Ward’s profile depicted a young, entitled scion who was at turns arrogant and vindictive. In one sense, the story emasculated Kushner, portraying him as a subservient son-in-law. This was certainly not the image of her husband that Ivanka Trump wanted presented to the world in the glossy pages of a popular men’s magazine.

So she did what any rich, New York City media-connected, powerful spouse would do—and then took it up a couple of notches: Ivanka, according to Ward, called Esquire’s editor-in-chief at the time, Jay Fielden, and literally started crying, pleading with him to take down the story. [...] Jared and Ivanka’s side leveled against Ward for falsifying the story. But the piece remained online and was published in the October print issue; no substantive changes or retractions were made to Ward’s reporting.

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While Jared and Ivanka might not go full Harvey Weinstein on reporters—the former movie executive hired ex-Mossad agents to track journalists and intimidate sources—there is no question, Ward says, that Jared and Ivanka have no compunction going to the head of news outlets to interfere with pieces they deem unflattering. “Every reporter knows they will be on the phone to Rupert Murdoch. Their guiding credo is PR above everything else. Ivanka thinks she is brilliant at public relations,” said Ward, the author of Kushner, Inc., and a senior reporter at CNN.

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Ivanka received virtually no additional press scrutiny after The New Yorker detailed her work on a real-estate project in Azerbaijan with local partners who had alleged ties to the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a designated terrorist organization. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee subsequently called on the Justice Department and the Treasury Department to investigate the deal for possibly violating the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.

Then there was Ivanka’s very close brush with a criminal indictment for inflating condo sales to potential buyers at the Trump Soho, a development project she helped oversee. And remember it was Ivanka, among others, who advocated for the hiring of Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn. (A spokesperson for a prominent Washington think tank told me it was “malpractice” by congressional Democrats that Ivanka hasn’t been subpoenaed by the House Intelligence Committee.) Somehow, though, none of these poor judgement calls have made it into the dominant media narrative about the first daughter.

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[S]he has spent “the near-entirety of her adult life working the media,” as The Financial Times noted in a 2017 profile. She also is that rarest of trifectas serving in the West Wing: a celebrity, a social media star, and a child of the sitting president. This status gives her unprecedented power to wield in the media arena, and wield it she does.

Ivanka doesn’t blast the press as the enemy of the people, like her father does. Rather, she sees the news media as her personal enrichment and image-enhancement tool—which was, for many years, very much the case when she was a socialite living on the Upper East Side, fawned over by the lifestyle and fashion press. One editor who has worked for three leading national publications told me that she thought that Ivanka is the hardest Washington beat to cover. “With Donald, it’s all out there. By contrast, Ivanka is secretive, cryptic, controlled, and poised,” the editor said speaking on the condition of anonymity.

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But Ivanka can also go into full attack mode when the news cycle winds aren’t favorable, specifically when she feels particularly embarrassed and belittled by the coverage. Take, for instance, the reaction of the White House press office after BBC reporter Parham Ghabodi tweeted a video taken by the French presidential palace showing Ivanka trying awkwardly to insert herself into a conversation with world leaders.

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Ivanka, according to one Washington reporter, was extremely rankled by the media’s reaction to the video, which rang up nearly 23 million views and more than 100,000 likes and retweets. So Jessica Ditto, the deputy White House communications director who now handles most of the first daughter’s press, wrote a snarling email to Ghabodi: “Your speculative tweet has created negative attacks and press on something that could easily have been explained had you simply asked or read the information the White House and G20 released.”

  The Daily Beast

Imagine that. 'If you just take what we hand out, you'll have all the information you need.'

Ivanka must win, or at least try to win, every piece, every snub, and every news cycle. And here’s how that strategy played out with my CJR story, which was examining, among other things, Ivanka’s accountability to the public for her record in business and government. On Sept. 3, 2017 I wrote to Raffel asking if I could get confirmation on the record of my distillation of Raffel’s previous statements about Ivanka; namely, that the White House believes Ivanka should only be held accountable by the media on the policy areas on which she works and oversees.

I told Raffel my deadline was Sept. 13 at noon. The day after my deadline, on Sept. 14, Raffel said Ivanka was officially declining to comment for my story. Coincidentally, that was the same day the Financial Times ran a flattering profile of the first daughter which Ivanka cooperated for, giving the paper three in-person interviews. Raffel wanted to make sure I had seen it, so on Sept. 15, he wrote me an email with a link to the Financial Times story and a short message saying: “probably worth reading this one. She [Ivanka] has said things on the record that are useful to ure [sic] story.”

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Raffel had gone for, and scored, the PR touchdown—putting his side’s spin out there prior to the release of what he perceived would be a critical counter-narrative.

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Last year [...] Ivanka told the public that the administration is taking bold action to combat the evils of human trafficking, yet the administration she serves is approving the lowest level of so-called “T visas,” which provide immigration relief for foreign-born trafficking victims, since 2010. “They are transparently destroying protections for trafficking victims,” said Martina E. Vandenberg, the founder and director of the Human Trafficking Legal Center.

But what Ivanka’s pet issues really provide her with is cover and a very convenient distraction flag when the questions get dicey. For instance, when Ivanka was asked what she thinks about the Democrats’ effort to impeach her father for urging the Ukrainian president to open investigations into his political rivals, she can say, as she did on Fox News, that she’s just more focused on “fighting for the American worker” than anything else and that’s her “priority.”

She has to tread carefully if she wants to be president.

One way to look at Ivanka and her relationship with the press is that she is just another chapter in what is becoming the prevailing storyline of this era in American history: the protected status afforded to white, wealthy, socially connected, and media-savvy titans of business and culture.

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In over three years of reporting on Ivanka, the only person I found who was willing to break the Upper East Side code of silence and go on the record criticizing Ivanka was Christina Lewis Halpern. Her father, Reginald Lewis, was once the richest black man in America and she moved in the same social circles of New York City private schools and Ivy League schools as Ivanka.

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It was Lewis Halpern who tipped me off to the fact that Ivanka had lied on the back cover of her bestselling 2009 autobiographical self-help book, The Trump Card. Ivanka claimed she had graduated from Wharton summa cum laude, the highest distinction of honors given by the school, when she had really graduated cum laude, two notches below. (Ivanka’s PR team officially copped to it, calling it an “instance of confusion surrounding the specific level of honors.”)

Yeah, confusion.

I intend to get to that Kushner article in Esquire, but it's a long one, so who knows when (or actually if) I will.  Check it out yourself here.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.