Once upon a time, there was a quaint idea in this country that you join the White House to serve the American public. Now, the senior advisers to the president barely operate on the pretense. Wednesday, we learned that Jared Kushner, the Son-in-Law-in-Chief, was both stripped of his security clearance and had become a high-value target for manipulation by foreign governments because of his naïveté as a political operator and his company's dire financial straits. It's unlikely those developments are unrelated, as Kushner's business entanglements and freewheeling statecraft could have made him a security risk.

Today, though, we learned the conflicts presented by Kushner's private business are domestic, too. The New York Times reports that Kushner Companies received two high-dollar loans from financial services companies shortly after their executives met with Kushner at the White House.

Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo Global Management, was advising Trump administration officials on infrastructure policy. During that period, he met on multiple occasions with Jared Kushner...in November, Apollo lent $184 million to Mr. Kushner’s family real estate firm, Kushner Companies. The loan was to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper...

It was one of the largest loans Kushner Companies received last year. An even larger loan came from Citigroup, which lent the firm and one of its partners $325 million to help finance a group of office buildings in Brooklyn. That loan was made in the spring of 2017, shortly after Mr. Kushner met in the White House with Citigroup’s chief executive, Michael L. Corbat, according to people briefed on the meeting. The two men talked about financial and trade policy and did not discuss Mr. Kushner’s family business, one person said.

At best, the timing here merely creates the appearance of a conflict of interest and a misuse of power—another reminder that ethics policies exist for a reason. Normally, senior White House officials divest themselves completely of their private financial interests so that they can simply serve the public while in office. (The goal is for the public to have confidence that decisions are being made solely in the best interests of the United States, and that officials are not using their positions to secure sweetheart deals for themselves.)

Kushner divested just a small portion of his private holdings—for instance, he still holds his stake in the Chicago property that the Apollo loan went towards servicing. In the worst case scenario, this report would indicate Kushner is doing his private company's business out of his White House office, though there's no evidence at this point that the loans were discussed during those meetings.

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The trials of the young prince are just one dimension of the angst that threatens to subsume the White House and the president. Axios reports that the West Wing is in a state of war. Chief of Staff John Kelly is locked in a deathmatch against the various Trumpian kin, including Kushner, his wife Ivanka Trump, and Donald Trump, Jr.—the son who we were told would not involve himself in the politics while he and his brother ran their father's business while King Trump was in office. The Trump spawn are salty at Kelly for leaving Kushner in the stocks, stripping him of his (scandalously long-held) temporary top-secret security clearance then watching on as Kushner was dragged through the mud by anonymous White House aides.

The turmoil has chanced the reappearance of Anthony Scaramucci, who's not here to...well, you know. The Mooch hates John Kelly, because Kelly kicked him to the curb after he went postal on his colleagues to a New Yorker reporter. Nonetheless, the Goodfellas character who broke out of your Netflix queue and into our national dialogue made some fair points on CNN:



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Kelly certainly was scandalized by The Mooch's rough language, but not by Rob Porter's rough treatment of both of his ex-wives. The image of John Kelly: Man of Honor is not burnished as the days go by. In the end, Kelly will likely be shown the door—but not because of any of that. Trump will choose his children, as he always does, and will soon be looking for a new chief of staff in addition to a new communications director.

The departure of Hope Hicks is another source of formidable angst for President Trump. Hicks is described by more than one insider as Trump's most trusted aide—perhaps on a level above the cherished Ivanka. Certainly, she is the most trusted non-family member, says Axios. She is the latest close ally to hunt for the door, one day after she admitted in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee to telling "white lies" for the president's benefit. Also departing is Kushner's PR guru, Josh Raffel, as Kushner is buried in negative press and, it increasingly seems, will not be able to do anything resembling his actual job. (It's hard to solve Middle East peace without a security clearance.)

Meanwhile, according to Axios, "economic adviser Gary Cohn is at war with trade policy adviser Peter Navarro" while intelligence chiefs are publicly undermining Trump on Russia. Then again, Trump refuses to grant the NSA "day-to-day" authority to combat Russian cyber attacks, and it remains in doubt whether Trump accepts Russia conducted a campaign to influence the 2016 election. Oh, and the president is at war with his own attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who he has long since decided is not doing enough to protect him. Trump apparently still believes Sessions is his lawyer, rather than a law enforcement agent, and also apparently calls him "Mr. Magoo."

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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