Donald Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner reported more than half a billion dollars in outside income while they worked as advisers to the president, according to an analysis by a government watchdog group.
Ivanka and Jared offered to give up their government salaries when they announced that they would be working in the White House. Their supporters praised the move as some sort of selfless act, but a government salary is less than 1% of the total amount the couple made while in Washington.
An analysis by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) says the couple made between $172 million and $640 million in outside income.
From the analysis:
One major factor in their outside profits came from Ivanka Trump’s ownership stake in the Trump Hotel in D.C., just blocks from the White House and the locus of influence peddling in the Trump administration. Before business slowed down due to the pandemic, the couple paid a combined 23 visits to the hotel. All told, Ivanka made more than $13 million from the hotel since 2017.… The hotel was far from Ivanka Trump’s only controversial source of income while working in the White House. In 2018, Ivanka announced she was shutting down her namesake brand, and she later filed a disclosure with the government that “[a]ll operations of the business ceased on July 31, 2018.” But [CREW] discovered that she still made up to $1 million from it in 2019 despite the fact that she claimed it no longer existed.
In what would become the defining scandal of her time in office, in October 2018 Ivanka’s brand won 16 new trademarks from the Chinese government, including for voting machines. These approvals came about three months after Ivanka announced that her brand was shutting down, and mark the largest number of new Chinese trademarks she received in a single month during the Trump presidency. Six months after the company officially shut down, it received a new trademark to sell the Ivanka brand in Canada. In all, CREW found at least 28 foreign trademarks approved for Ivanka Trump while in the White House.
In 2019 Jared’s father infamously said we should cut his son some slack because he made “a substantial financial sacrifice” when he decided to work in the White House. But Jared’s real estate business benefited from policies implemented by the Trump administration that either Ivanka or himself worked on.
[Ivanka] worked on the Trump administration’s implementation of the Opportunity Zones program in 2018, apparently violating conflict of interest law in the process. At the same time that Ivanka was working on Opportunity Zones, Jared owned a significant financial stake in a company called Cadre which offers investment vehicles under the Opportunity Zones program. When Trump and Kushner entered the administration, Kushner’s stake in Cadre was valued between $5 million and $25 million. The value would rise to $25 million to $50 million. Kushner originally failed to disclose his ownership in Cadre. Despite the fact that the top White House ethics official determined at one point that it was “reasonably necessary” for him to divest from Cadre in order to do his job at the White House, he never did.
During his final year working for the administration, Kushner also opened a new offshore holding company located in the British Virgin Islands, Kushner Companies BVI Limited, which holds several assets, including the Puck Building LP, which is valued at more than $25 million.
