AFPI donors are offered private dinners with Jared Kushner…In 2015 Jared’s business accepted a $250 million credit line from convicted felon, George Soros, who is also an investor in Jared’s business.
…………………..
9/1/22, ““America First” In Name Only," Pedro Gonzalez, Chronicles Magazine
“A Poisonous confluence has emerged in Washington, D.C., where the
waters of the swamp converge
with the promise of “America First.”
On July 26, Donald Trump headlined the America First Agenda Summit,
hosted by the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the nonprofit known
in Trump world as
“the White House in waiting.”…
But there is just one small problem:
AFPI is the swamp; it is an organization that is
run, staffed, and affiliated with the worst people from the Trump White House,
who systematically undermined the America First mandate and who
promoted the interests of the establishment during Trump’s presidency. The summit provided a snapshot of this problem.
Belying its populist put-ons was a roster of dyed-in-the-wool establishmentarians,
from Sen. Lindsey Graham to Rep. Kevin McCarthy and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The latter commended boozy Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for not backing down on her unnecessary and provocative trip to Taiwan despite warnings from China—
praise that AFPI’s audience applauded.
Republican Sen. Joni Ernst demanded
“that we absolutely annihilate the Russian forces,
and we get them to crawl back into Russia so bloody and bruised that they can’t come back.”
Rep. Mike Waltz [Fla] called for
U.S. personnel to get “directly into the war to operate U.S. weapons systems
[“Speaking of the situation in Ukraine, Trump told donors that the US should put Chinese flags on America’s F-22s and then
‘bomb the s***’ out of Russia,
leading to conflict between the nations while ‘we sit back and watch.'”…3/6/22, “‘This is a massive crime against humanity’: Trump says we ‘can’t let’ the situation in [US colony] Ukraine continue and slams ‘paper tiger’ NATO for its inaction,” Daily Mail, Gina Martinez]
Of course, there is nothing “America First” about the foreign policy promoted
by these Republicans.
In fact, it is utterly opposed to the realism and restraint
that places the interests of the American people over foreign entanglements.
This hawkish mindset is also at odds with Trump’s [2015-2016] promise
to bring America home from endless wars
and humanitarian interventions,
and to stop looting the American people in order to subsidize international [colonies] satrapies—also known as “foreign aid.”
So what is AFPI, and why does it have so much access to Trump?
Understanding that requires revisiting the Office of American Innovation (OAI), an agency within the White House Office
created for and directed by Trump’s son-in-law,
Jared Kushner.
In policy, personnel, and outlook, OAI was the precursor to AFPI.
In theory, the agency was redundant because it performed a similar role as the National Economic Council and Domestic Policy Council (DPC). In practice, that didn’t matter because
its real purpose was to act as a vehicle for Kushner and his allies
to hijack the White House’s policy shop.
Key members of OAI included Larry Kudlow, now the vice chair of AFPI’s board, and and Brooke Rollins, its president and CEO.
“OAI was Jared’s shadow DPC, which
he was eventually able to formally take over
through Brooke running DPC in 2020,”
a person familiar with AFPI operations told Chronicles. “The main figures from Jared’s OAI and DPC have key roles at AFPI. The other AFPI ‘leadership’ were not with OAI but
are reliably Never Trump in their outlook,
which is shameful.”
Kushner created the office in 2017 with the help of Reed Cordish, whose wife
is a longtime friend of Jared’s wife, Ivanka Trump.
In April that year [2017], Trump prepared a directive to review the H-1B visa program,
which is commonly used by corporations
to replace American-born workers
with lower-paid immigrants.
Through the OAI, Kushner and Cordish used that corporate pressure
as leverage to undermine the president’s efforts.
Anonymous sources told the technology news website Recode that “tech executives, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos,
received an early warning
about Trump’s coming directive
who “convened them and other executives as part of his tech-focused efforts with the White House’s new Office of American Innovation.”
Liberal media seemed to see the OAI for what it really was. CNBC, for example, called the rise within the Trump administration of Chris Liddell, who worked closely in the OAI with Kushner,
who had emerged “as the standard bearer of the establishment faction of the Trump White House, which is locked in a perpetual power struggle with the more ideologically conservative wing.” Enter Rollins, a key part of the establishment faction, who got her start
as president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a Koch Foundation-funded think tank
based in Austin, Texas. A Daily Beast headline neatly summarized
the implications of her admission into the White House:
“White House Hires Prison-Reform Activist as a Trump Assistant.”
The Lone Star State would see
skyrocketing homicide rates by the end of 2021—
now with fewer detention facilities to contain the new crop of murderers.
With the help of Kushner, Rollins brought her soft-on-crime ideas to President Trump’s desk,
in what became the First Step Act.
The Act released a swarm of dangerous criminals from the federal prison system,
almost as soon as they got out of jail.
The Act also contained a provision to shorten mandatory minimums for traffickers caught smuggling drugs into the U.S. by sea. “These criminals have never been eligible for such leniency and are rarely if ever U.S. citizens,” said former Senator Jeff Sessions, who served as Trump’s attorney general. Indeed,
Rollins’s soft spot for criminals also extended to illegal aliens.
She was instrumental in using the OAI to produce what Reuters called
on Trump’s zero-tolerance policy
Nevertheless, the First Step Act became law in late 2018 and was soon followed by
similar legislation at the state level,
where criminal-justice reform initiatives advanced
despite rising national crime rates.
Rollins predicted that the Act would reduce repeat crime by reforming prisoners.
This has been proven false by a first-of-its-kind, decade-long study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission released in June 2022. The study found
“no statistically significant difference in the likelihood of recidivism among offenders who participated in Occupational Education Programs or Federal Prison Industries compared to offenders who did not participate in the programs.”
In other words, the First Step Act,
which became trademark Trump White House policy,
was based on a premise that has been conclusively
proven to be flawed.
So enamored was Rollins with criminals that she and her colleagues in the OAI, including Ja’Ron Smith, who later joined Rollins at AFPI,
urged Trump not to crack down on rioters during 2020’s
summer of rage following the death of Saint George Floyd.
They argued that stopping mobs of black criminals from razing and looting entire communities
Instead, Kushner and Rollins put their heads together
to appease the destroyers.
They invited rapper Ice Cube, best known for his song “F— Tha Police,” to the White House to get his input on what became the Platinum Plan.
Mr. Cube asked Trump’s team
to declare Juneteenth a federal holiday
and to pledge $500 billion to the black community—
which appeared to be halfway between reparations and a ransom in the context of the ongoing race riots.
They agreed and added, among other things, the promise of additional criminal justice reform
during Trump’s second term.
It wasn’t just run-of-the-mill felons who benefited under the auspices of AFPI’s spiritual predecessor.
The OAI also usurped control over the Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney, where applications for pardons are referred.
In February 2020, The Washington Post reported that
Kushner “personally reviewed applications with White House lawyers
before presenting them to Trump for final approval,
according to two senior administration officials.” The process followed a pattern:
a few pardons to please populists,
and far more substantial ones to help friends of the OAI.
Notably these included
pardons for Charles Kushner, Jared’s father,
and Salomon Melgen, a sleazy Democrat megadonor.
It is difficult to provide profiles in brief of everyone who went on to join AFPI after subverting the Trump agenda, but
and Larry Kudlow.
Before joining the Trump administration, Wolf worked as a paid lobbyist for the National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM), a trade body of Indian firms. As the acting secretary of Homeland Security and undersecretary of Homeland Security for Strategy, Policy and Plans, Wolf was amenable to NASSCOM’s interests.
When coronavirus measures drove unemployment rates through the roof,
DHS, under Wolf, announced it would accelerate the processing
of H-1B foreign workers to U.S. and Indian companies.
Wolf’s DHS then went a step further by changing a rule
to accelerate the influx of these workers.
By March 2020, DHS began the process of
admitting 85,000 H-1B workers. On April 1, 2020, Wolf
used his discretionary powers to grant an additional 20,000 new H-2B visas
for seasonal guest workers.
The latter initiative was halted
due to scathing coverage by Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Wolf was also never proactive on securing funding for the border wall but did, instead,
lavish sanctuary cities protecting illegal aliens with discretionary funding,
effectively subsidizing lawbreaking with money
that was in his power to withhold.
Today, he serves as AFPI’s executive director and chief strategy officer,
doing the “good work” of promoting bad ideas alongside the likes of Kudlow.
In an article for American Greatness, [8/15/22, “The Clown Prince of Pennsylvania Avenue,” “Jared Kushner did more damage to the presidency and the Trump agenda during his four year reign of error at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue than anyone."] Peter Navarro, former assistant to the president for trade and manufacturing policy, described Kudlow as “the most famous offender” among the “free trade ideologues on record opposing Trump’s tariffs” in the White House. He was also a member of the OAI.
Kudlow, according to Navarro, was instrumental in
killing an effort to haul Dr. Anthony Fauci before a presidential commission
inquiring into the funding of the Wuhan laboratory,
suspected of leaking the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Kudlow and his allies were reportedly chiefly concerned about upsetting China and thereby getting bad press….
AFPI isn’t going to lead a radical reimagining of the federal government or drain the swamp—it merely wants to carve out a space
for itself to wallow in the muck. It does not produce an actual product but instead claims credit for what others do.
It has “America First” in its name, but you couldn’t find an organization whose members
did more in the Trump White House to undermine the essence of the phrase.
Its corridors are adorned with pictures of Kushner, like a shrine,
and it offers private dinners with him for donors.
It is a temple to a grift that
has infected right-wing populism,
and a dead end for America First.”
……………………………..
Added: “Kushner came to the D.C. swamp on the coattails of his wife
[who came on the coattails of her father] as nothing more than a young and rich, run-of-the-mill liberal New York Democrat
with a worldview totally orthogonal to the president he was supposed to serve….Never mind that he was
derailing, deterring, and delaying Trump’s [proclaimed] Make America Great Again agenda
in real-time and at great political and economic costs….
Ultimately, the biggest failure of the 2020 election was
The campaign went from the beautifully orchestrated Steve Bannon masterpiece
with 20 people on Trump Force One barnstorming flyover country,
to the ugliest equivalent of Hillary Clinton’s
beyond bloated Hindenburg of a campaign in just four years.
The construction of this Hindenburg was due entirely to the anything but dynamic duo of Brad Parscale (the putative campaign manager) and
Kushner himself (the actual campaign manager). These two…
squandered hundreds of millions of dollars on ridiculous baubles like Super Bowl ads
and a massively bloated payroll.
In the final weeks before November 3, the Trump campaign—
the most well-funded in history—
would have to pull its ad expenditures in key battleground states
like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin because it was out of cash;…
To this day, my old Boss [Trump]
just how much damage Kushner/Rasputin did to the presidency and the Trump agenda
during his four year reign of error at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.” [Ivanka image AFP]
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