white house drama
Trump says John Kelly will decide on classified access for 'high-quality person' Jared Kushner
Chief of Staff John Kelly will make the decision about whether to revoke access to classified information for Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law and senior adviser, the president said Friday. Trump expressed confidence in Kelly's judgment and praised his son-in-law as "a high-quality person" who "has been treated unfairly."
Kushner "works for nothing," Trump added. "Nobody ever reports that. He gets zero. He doesn't get a salary." Many media outlets reported White House staff salaries, including Kushner's $0 rate, when they were published last summer.
Kushner is among more than 100 White House staff of varying levels of seniority who still lacked security clearance as of November, and he has so far resisted Kelly's move to limit his information access before clearance is granted.
On Friday evening, The Washington Post reported that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told the White House two weeks ago that Kushner's background check had uncovered information requiring additional investigation and thus further delaying his clearance process. Rosenstein reportedly did not tell the White House what his department has learned.