Jared Kushner had a rough week and it doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better

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It’s been a rough week for President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.
Kushner still faces congressional scrutiny after an internal White House memo suggested Trump was directly involved in granting his security clearance.
Kushner’s academic records and the circumstances surrounding his acceptance to Harvard University have also been publicly questioned.
Several other excerpts from the upcoming tell-all book on Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, shine an unflattering light on the couple.
In a statement to INSIDER about the book, a spokesperson for Kushner’s real-estate firm called the book "fiction," and said "the book is too fake and too dumb to warrant any comment."

It’s been a rough week for President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.

Questions surrounding the circumstances of his security clearance (and whether Trump influenced the process), still loom as lawmakers demand the US Justice Department launch an investigation into the matter.

According to people who were briefed on a contemporaneous memo, Trump had "ordered" former White House chief of staff John Kelly to upgrade Kushner’s interim top-secret security clearance. The incident reportedly concerned Kelly and prompted him to put it on the record.

Democratic lawmakers like Rep. Ted Lieu of California and Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia issued a joint statement saying they were "deeply disturbed" by the existence of Kelly’s memo, which was first reported by The New York Times last week.

"We request that the Department of Justice open an immediate investigation to determine if Mr. Kushner is criminally liable," the lawmakers said, as they referenced over a hundred foreign contacts that were omitted from Kushner’s initial security clearance application.

Reuters

But Kushner’s security clearance request isn’t the only official application that’s being scrutinized. His academic records and the circumstances surrounding his acceptance to Harvard University are also being scrutinized following the news of the FBI’s college admissions fraud case.

Several parents — including actresses, fashion designers, and finance executives — are accused of paying large sums of money and fabricating documents to help their kids get into prestigious colleges and universities.

High school faculty and notable Harvard classmates like Natalie Portman have previously cast doubt on Kushner’s academic performance.

In order to help secure his admission to Harvard, Kushner’s father allegedly pledged a donation of $2.5 million in 1998, according to joint investigation between ProPublica and the Guardian, fueling theories that Kushner’s acceptance to the Ivy League powerhouse was granted under questionable circumstances.

Reuters

This week was capped off with the release of several excerpts from an upcoming tell-all book on Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump.

"Kushner, Inc.: Greed. Ambition. Corruption. The Extraordinary Story of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump" is written by journalist Vicky Ward and provides a close look at Kushner’s and Ivanka’s journey to the White House.

The book, like the many other accounts from former Trump administration officials, is sourced from dozens of inside sources and paints an unflattering picture of the Trump administration. But Ward’s book differs in that it focuses on Kushner and Ivanka’s path to the White House, on Trump’s coattails "where no one, the President included, has been able to stop them."

Some of the excerpts report that Kushner had butted heads with numerous cabinet-level White House officials. In one example, Kushner is alleged to have taken the lead in diplomatic affairs, leaving then-secretary of state Rex Tillerson in the dark on several occasions.

"Foreign ministers relied so heavily on Kushner as their conduit to the government that foreign documents started showing up in meetings in the increasingly lean State Department, and no one knew where they’d come from," the book said, according to CNN. "The answer was usually Kushner."

Kushner’s role in US-foreign relations has alarmed many officials. A number of officials have pointed to his discreet relationship with the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman as an example of his questionable approach to diplomacy.

The Saudi leader is suspected to be directly responsible for the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at a consulate in Turkey — an assessment that the Trump administration refused to acknowledge.

Kushner’s associates have widely rejected the accounts in Ward’s book and have described them as "entirely false."

In a statement to INSIDER about the book, a spokesperson for Kushner’s real-estate firm called the book "fiction," and said "the book is too fake and too dumb to warrant any comment."

Ward’s book was the No. 1 best-seller in Amazon’s "Corruption & Misconduct in Politics" book list at the time of this publication.

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Source: Business Insider – dchoi@businessinsider.com (David Choi)