Did Israeli Ambassador Dictate The AIPAC Speech Jared Kushner Wrote For Trump?
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump addresses the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Image by Getty Images
It appears Jared Kushner may have lifted a speech he was credited for writing for President Trump from a foreign source.
According to a new book, “Born Trump” by Vanity Fair’s Emily Jane Fox, Israeli Ambassador Ron Dermer essentially dictated Trump’s speech for Kushner, who then loaded it into the teleprompter ahead of the 2016 AIPAC Policy Conference, Politico reported Sunday.
On a call with Kushner leading up to the speech, directed toward the staunch Jewish lobbying group, Dermer “talked for a solid hour about the U.N., about Iran, about hard lines and language that was very important to the Israelis, and about many people who would be in the audience that day,” Fox wrote.
The next day, Kushner sent a copy of the speech to Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson for review. Adelson then forwarded it back to Dermer. “The text Dermer read was like a transcript of what he had told Jared in their phone call, right down to the jokes,” Fox writes.
Dermer admitted that he briefed Kushner but denied that the senior adviser took his talking points. “The suggestion that I dictated Trump’s AIPAC speech to Jared Kushner is ridiculous,” Dermer said in a statement to Politico.
This situation came before Melania Trump lifted entire paragraphs in her Republican National Convention speech from a speech delivered by Michelle Obama eight years earlier.
Fox writes that Kushner was angry about that gaffe and looking for someone to blame.
At a hotel gym in Cleveland, he approached a campaign staffer and told him, “This was all [campaign chairman Paul] Manafort’s fault,” according to the book, out Tuesday. A month later, Manafort was fired, replaced with Kellyanne Conway.
Kushner was quick to blame Manafort, but, at other times, he wanted to take credit for serving as the real campaign manager, Fox writes. She notes that Kushner never considered Conway a real campaign manager and has continued to take credit for that job himself.
Alyssa Fisher is a news writer at the Forward. Email her at fisher@forward.com, or follow her on Twitter at @alyssalfisher
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