Excerpted from a longer Op-Ed in the LA Times by Kurt Bardella.
Bardella was former spokesperson and senior advisor for the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee under Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Vista).
He was also Breitbart’s spokesman before resigning in early 2016.
For years, I worked with congressional Republicans on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to vigorously police Barack Obama’s presidency.
We attacked the Obama administration with velocity and enthusiasm. No corner of the federal government was safe from our scrutiny. Any appearance of impropriety was thoroughly investigated.
We told the American people and ourselves that taxpayers had a fundamental right to know what was going on with their money inside their government. Like a mantra, we spoke out about the need to hold the executive branch accountable and provide a check-and-balance to the president’s power.
Flash forward to 2017: Under the Trump administration and an even larger congressional majority, oversight Republicans are completely MIA.
What happened to their bravado and self-righteousness? What happened to holding the president to the highest possible standard of ethical scrutiny?
A new report from Bloomberg reveals how President Trump’s son-in-law and senior White House advisor Jared Kushner is on a desperate “hunt for cash” to address “hundreds of millions of dollars” his family’s real estate business owes on a “41-story office building on Fifth Avenue.”
The mortgage on the building is due in just 18 months. Kushner has been on an international hunt for investment that has had him shaking the money trees in South Korea, France, Israel, China, Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
At the same time, Kushner, as reported by the Washington Post, has been playing the role of “shadow diplomat,” becoming the “primary point of contact for presidents, ministers, ambassadors from more than two dozen countries … in Europe, the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific region.”
In June, when Kushner, who has zero diplomatic and foreign policy experience, traveled to the Middle East to pursue a peace deal between the Israelis and the Palestinians, it is conceivable that he was simultaneously furthering his “hunt for cash.”
Remember when candidate Trump accused Hillary Clinton of running a “vast criminal enterprise” out of the State Department?
Well, Mr. President, what in the world would you call what your daughter’s husband is doing right now from inside the West Wing?
At best, it’s a conflict of interest. At worst, it’s an invitation for bribery.
