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Ivanka Trump Believes That She'll Be President One Day

This week Congress continued to investigate Ivanka's emails, she helped propose changes in student loans, and the tell-all book Kushner Inc. made its way around the internet.

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The first daughter and White House advisor's schedule isn't public, but we'll keep you posted on her goings-on every week.
• Ivanka has not complied with federal laws to preserve her email communications, House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said on Thursday. He said in a letter her lawyer told the committee last year that she doesn't preserve official emails in her personal account if she does not respond to them, which he said appears to violate the Presidential Records Act. Rep. Cummings said that is a violation of the Presidential Records Act. In the same letter, Cummings said Jared Kushner has been conducting official government business via WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service, which includes communicating with "people outside the United States." Last year, a Washington Post report found that Ivanka used her personal email account for White House business, which is in violation of federal records rules. Shortly after, Ivanka gave a rare interview defending her use of a private account. When asked about Kushner's WhatsApp use Friday morning, President Trump said, "I know nothing about it. I've never heard of that," according to a pool report.
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• On Monday, Ivanka, along with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and other officials, released a set of proposals to modernise the Higher Education Act. Those include adding lending caps for graduate students and parents borrowing for undergraduate education, based on the argument that there's a correlation between tuition increases and the availability of student aid, which is an idea some higher education researchers have disputed. Trump's budget has called for eliminating the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program, which relieves borrowers of their remaining student debt after they have worked in public service for 10 years, but this proposal calls for extending loan forgiveness "to all undergraduate students" in order to eliminate "biases" and bureaucracy.
• On Tuesday, a new tell-all book Kushner Inc., by HuffPo editor-at-large Vicky Ward, was released, for which Ward interviewed hundreds of sources to explore the role Ivanka and Jared Kushner play in the White House. Ward paints the couple as cynical opportunists who hope to have it both ways — retain their businesses and socialite reputations, both of which have reportedly already suffered, while working in Trump's White House, with all the controversy that brings. A spokesperson for Ivanka called it "fiction."
A few choice tidbits from the book:
• Ivanka has said that she wants to be president and that her father's presidency is the beginning of a great American dynasty. "She thinks she's going to be president of the United States," Trump's former economic advisor Gary Cohn said according to the book. "She thinks this is like the Kennedys, the Bushes, and now the Trumps."
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• Ivanka and Melania apparently feuded over a White House office. Ivanka had picked out an office in the East Wing for herself, and transition officials were surprised Melania didn't have her own office. But "Melania put her foot down," and Ivanka was told to back off.
• When Steve Bannon and Dina Powell (both no longer at the White House) were discussing Ivanka's proposed women's economic empowerment initiatives, he reportedly told Powell, "Listen, I love it. But I just don't want to embarrass Ivanka. None of the Republicans on Capitol Hill care about this stuff."
• On Ivanka's relationship with her dad: "He'd call her 'baby' or pat her on the bottom," Ward writes. "He sometimes stopped what he was doing to ogle [Ivanka] when she left the room. ‘Doesn’t she look great?’ he would say to others in the room. ... But their relationship was also more complex than anyone could fathom. Very, very occasionally Trump embarrassed Ivanka, deliberately showing White House senior staff — and her — the limitations of her brazen efforts to manipulate him. It was apparent that he sometimes thought she needed to be publicly reminded who's in charge."
• Hillary Clinton supporters questioned Ivanka's programmes for women, like the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity Initiative (which includes proposals similar to a lot of Clinton's work), when at the same time her father's budget proposes major cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), as well as food stamps, Medicare, Medicaid, and the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. "I can’t quibble with the fundamental premise," Melanne Verveer, executive director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, and a longtime advisor to Clinton, told The Daily Beast. "This is something that nobody disagrees with fundamentally, but where do you go with the money, how do you measure success, what other programs do you build on? This initiative doesn’t have a lot of specifics."
• According to a new poll by Insider of 1,100 people, 67% of those who responded said they don't know exactly what Ivanka and Jared Kushner do in the White House. Hopefully this column will help clear up some of the confusion for those who still don't know!
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