Finally! Congress is at last investigating Jared Kushner and that $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia.
I spoke to former White House ethics czar Richard Painter about what it means—and what happens next. https://vickyward.substack.com/p/if-existing-law-does-not-prohibit?s=w#details
On the eve of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee, I talked with my old friend Robert Hardman, royal expert and biographer of Queen of Our Times: The Life of Queen Elizabeth II, about what it all means: what he thinks could happen to the monarchy post-Elizabeth and whether the royal renegades Harry, Meghan, and Andrew will be a distraction this week. Perhaps most fascinatingly, he gives us snippets from some of the Queen’s meetings with fourteen U.S. presidents and tells us why both George W. Bush and Barack Obama were so thrilled to meet her.
“You get this often quite strained relationship between the White House and Downing Street, but the relationship between the White House and Buckingham Palace has always been very solid during the Queen’s reign,” says Hardman.
I did a follow-up to yesterday’s Q&A with former Trump adviser and GOP consultant Sam Nunberg about last night’s primary results to find out: What do they tell us about the Trump/De Santis battle for control of the GOP party?
I spoke to veteran political consultant Sam Nunberg, who worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, about what the election results tonight—particularly in Georgia and Alabama—will tell us about the battle for the control of the Republican Party. He has some very interesting things to say—particularly about the relevance of what happened in Wisconsin last weekend.
What’s going to happen to New York in the wake of the pandemic? How will the looming repeal of Roe v. Wade affect real estate in the city? These are things that a lot of people are talking about.
It’s perfect timing, then, for the publication of The New Kings of New York, which comes out today from The Real Deal.
I reached out to former White House ethics czar Richard Painter today following the latest reporting from the New York Times, which puts both Kushner and Mnuchin negotiating in the Gulf after the election (there, so they say, on behalf of the outgoing Trump administration). These visits raise important questions about what exactly was being discussed in those meetings in the last months of the Trump administration: Was it purely about government business or was it personal?
I spoke to Painter about the pieces of this story that played out in plain sight and why we’ve yet to see a full investigation—by the DOJ, Congress, or the Inspector General of the Treasury—to find out what Kushner and Mnuchin were really up to in the Middle East.
You may not have connected three stories that broke recently, but you should.
There is a link between the FBI suit against billionaire casino mogul (and Trump pal) Steve Wynn, the superseding indictment against Trump crony Tom Barrack, and the recent guilty plea by Richard Olson, the former ambassador to Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates.
Watch the video at “Vicky Ward Investigates” to find out what it is.
The last time I published a newsletter that quoted Russian supermodel Kira Dikhtyar, she was in New York. The war with Ukraine had just begun, and Dikhtyar found herself suddenly unable to get any work—no matter that she had dual citizenship. (She forwarded me an email from a New York modeling agent stating that they were no longer representing Russian models.) When we spoke first, she told me that she had many friends and relatives in Ukraine and that she was close friends with Ukrainian models also in New York.
But that was then.
Since then, on April 26, Dikhtyar returned to Moscow, where her son lives—a journey that was both stressful and complicated. She told me she was held for hours at the Russian border on account of her dual citizenship and faulty spelling on her documents. In our Q&A below, she explains that she began to feel that “this is a war was between Russia and [the] United States. It just happens to be on Ukrainian soil” and that therefore she was forced to choose sides. It was the discrimination she received by the United States, she says, that made it impossible for her not to choose Russia. The first signal she gave that she had chosen was to post a photograph on Instagram of herself kissing her son, whose head was newly-shaved with the Z sign clearly visible above his left ear.
I had a series of conversations with Dikhtyar over several days. Read them at “Vicky Ward Investigates.”
These past two weeks, I’ve had a series of conversations with Leonid Dyachenko, the former son-in-law of Boris Yeltsin, who lives in London but still has a Russian citizenship. He shared his thoughts on Russia, Ukraine, the West, and whether or not Putin has gone mad. (His answer is yes.)