Jared and Ivanka’s Trusted White House PR Hound is a Hillary Clinton Donor
Since President Donald Trump’s inauguration, it has frequently been reported that his daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner, who both hold senior positions in the White House, have been running an extensive PR campaign to protect their personal brand.
And a new report by Buzzfeed’s Steven Perlberg takes an inside look at that PR apparatus, manned by a 33-year-old White House spokesman who also happens to be a Hillary Clinton donor.
That’s Josh Raffel, a “product of the ruthless New York corporate arena,” Perlberg reports, who “conducts the ‘blocking and tackling’ for Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, routinely making the couple available for off-the-record chats, sources say.”
Per Buzzfeed:
He’s smart and good-humored, and reporters who’ve battled with him say he comfortably oscillates between friendly chatter and aggressiveness. One White House reporter said he’s the most competent staffer in the West Wing.
…
Ivanka Trump and Kushner, who both hold senior White House roles, are the subject of endless media fascination. And when reporters are writing about the couple, they will quickly hear back from Raffel.
And where Ivanka and Jared have often come under scrutiny for supposed liberal views and their incoherence with the far-right policies of the president, it seems their most trusted flak is no different: associates of Raffel told Buzzfeed “he hardly supports the Trump agenda.” And according to public records, the young White House staffer even “donated to Hillary Clinton as late as October 2016.”
Nonetheless, Raffel took up a role in Kushner’s Office of American Innovation, which he works in whilst running what Perlberg describes as “a press shop within a press shop defending the couple’s personal brands.”
That means Raffel likely had a hand in the slew of reports detailing Jared and Ivanka’s efforts to tame President Trump’s more unpopular and extreme positions, which raised more than a few eyebrows.
But it seems that while Raffel is running Jivanka’s personal PR operation, he has maintained a good relationship with White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who told Buzzfeed he is “very integrated” in the press team and that she speaks to him “30 times a day.”
Worth noting: the report on Jivanka’s press-schmooze operation has already drawn criticism from Trump’s far-right base. Blogger Mike Cernovich knocked the couple in a tweet claiming their “desire to be loved by media will have consequences for Admin”:
As I’ve said from beginning, Jared and Ivanka’s desire to be loved by media will have consequences for Admin. https://t.co/ax14niJeLt
— Mike Cernovich ?? (@Cernovich) August 9, 2017
[image via screengrab]
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