Even more concerning than the cost of this seemingly unnecessary trip for which we the taxpayers are footing the bill, is this McClatchy report on hundreds of man-hours being spent by Jared to monitor opinion in the Middle East in order to increase the chances of his peace plan being accepted:
At Jared Kushner’s direction, U.S. government agencies have combined data tools and human expertise for the first time to officially rank Arab media outlets over their coverage of the Middle East peace process.
Roughly 50 regional media organizations have been assessed by the government for their influence and attitudes toward U.S. policy in the Middle East, according to sensitive interagency reports exclusively reviewed by McClatchy....Three senior administration officials said the purpose of Kushner’s project is to connect with local populations as effectively as possible – to better understand “what’s driving the street” across the Arab world, so that he and his team can target their communications with greater precision.
Kushner ordered the project in 2018:
The reports break into two categories. One product assesses the public consumption of news in each country in the region, including a breakdown by age, internet usage, and the percentage of people getting information on mobile devices, newspapers, or television.
The second type of report examines specific media outlets, assessing the neutrality of each organization in how it portrays U.S. policy, rating its influence and listing its ownership, based on analyses from two government agencies examining publicly available material.
The reports are highly detailed. For example, Kushner’s team discovered that cell phone penetration among Palestinians is so high that a majority now get their news on mobile devices while waiting in line to go through an Israeli checkpoint.
...Regional U.S. embassies and Arabic language spokesmen from the State Department participate in the outreach effort, officials said.
How can this possibly be an acceptable use of taxpayer money? It seems geared toward putting a feather in Trump's cap for the 2020 election, another venture Kushner is heavily involved in. Anytime I hear the term "digital strategy" associated with Trump, it always leads back to Jared's good buddy Brad Parscale, who Kushner picked to run Trump's 2016 "digital strategy team" and who is now Trump's 2020 campaign manager(assisted by Trump's daughter in law Lara, married to son Eric.)
I get that Kushner is wealthy and can spend his money however he wants. But he shouldn't get to spend our money however he wants, especially on efforts that are inseparable from Donald Trump's reelection campaign. No one but Trump asked Jared to solve the middle east peace problem, a task for which he has absolutely no prior qualifications or experience. If Kushner gets support for even 1 minor point of a 50 point plan, even if it's on an economic issue rather than a peace issue, you know Donald Trump will claim to his underinformed base during the 2020 campaign that he made more progress towards middle east peace than any other president in history and they would foolishly believe him.
Congress or someone needs to put the economic brakes on Jared Kushner's spending on whimiscal "opinion mining among data scientists" as well as his repetititive cruising through the middle east and elsewhere on our dime.
Our mainstream media is not even covering this McClatchy article. It's far more interested in writing about the reputation of the Kushner family business in Baltimore.
