Jared Kushner claimed in his recently released memoir that his wife, Ivanka Trump, was instructed by her father to set up a meeting with Hillary Clinton in the waning hours after his victory over his Democratic rival in the 2016 election.
Donald Trump’s son-in-law, who quickly rose through the ranks of family to assume a senior White House adviser role in his father-in-law’s administration, wrote in Breaking History: A White House Memoir, set to hit the shelves Tuesday, that Mr Trump wanted to broker a meeting with Ms Clinton in an attempt to resolve a “cordial relationship”.
By Mr Kushner’s telling, the former real estate mogul reportedly “genuinely wanted to help the country unite”. The Hill first reported the detail from the book.
The proposed meeting came after Mr Trump spent months sowing discord in his bid for the White House in 2016, which included an in-person promise made to Ms Clinton on stage during the 9 October presidential debate, where he swore to have his attorney general “to look into your situation” if elected president.
As written by her husband, Ivanka Trump was reportedly asked by her father shortly after Ms Clinton had delivered her concession speech to reach out to her once-friend Chelsea Clinton, 42, to see if the pair could find a way to broker a dinner between the soon-to-be 45th president and the couple who had occupied the White House for the better part of the ’90s.
Ms Trump was given the instruction to “convey that Trump had no intention of looking backward and hoped to have a cordial relationship with Hillary to unite the country,” Mr Kushner writes.
“He even told Ivanka to invite Hillary and Bill for dinner in the coming weeks,” Mr Kushner wrote of the soon-to-be commander in chief, who had championed the “lock her up” chants in the latter half of his campaign about his Democratic rival.
The meeting, it appears, went south shortly after it was promoted by the president, Mr Kushner writes in his tell-all memoir.
“Ivanka did call Chelsea,” Mr Kushner writes, but adds that “days later Hillary backed [Green Party presidential nominee] Jill Stein’s challenge to the election, and Trump ended his outreach.”
The buddy-buddy relationship between the Trumps and the Clintons during the early aughts is well-documented, with the now infamous shot of the former secretary of state and her husband celebrating the nuptials of Mr Trump to his third wife Melania Trump at his Florida resort in Mar-a-Lago being frequently dug out throughout the 2016 election as evidence of their chummier years.
Mr Trump also notably even donated to the Clintons political causes, giving more than $4,000 to Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaigns and more than $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to PolitiFact.
