It remains an open question whether anyone within President Donald Trump’s immediate family will be caught up in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation.
Could at least one member of the president’s innermost circle (Donj, I’m lookin’ at you here buddy) become the next Paul Manafort at some point? Who knows. But wholly unqualified White House Senior Staffer Ivanka Trump isn’t worried at all. In fact, everything’s going just peachy.
“I have zero concern,” Ivanka told fellow nepotism beneficiary Abby Huntsman during an ABC News interview on Friday.
Trump later told Huntsman that she was “barely” involved in plans to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, in spite of the fact that she was reportedly copied on emails or briefed directly on the proposed property deal by former Trump organization attorney Michael Cohen. (Cohen has since pleaded guilty to lying to Congress about how far along plans to build the tower had progressed during the 2016 campaign.) According to CNN, Ivanka’s knowledge of the plans were “limited to recommending architects and designers,” which seems...not all that limited, really.
Ivanka’s father has emphatically denied having anything to do with Russia during the 2016 campaign, saying at one point that he had “no business whatsoever with Russia, have nothing to do with Russia.”
In a statement to BuzzFeed last month, a representative for Ivanka attempted to minimize her involvement in the plans, saying, “Ms. Trump did not know about this proposal until after a non-binding letter of intent had been signed, never talked to anyone outside the Organization about the proposal, never visited the prospective project site and, even internally, was only minimally involved.”
Ivanka herself echoed the sentiment during her interview, saying:
It’s not like it’s a strange thing, as a hospitality company or a development company, to have a hotel or a property in Russia. We’re not talking about Iran. It was Russia. And we weren’t even advanced enough that anyone had even visited the prospective project site. So it really was just a non-factor in our minds. I’m not sure that anyone would have thought of it.
It’s fine folks. Everything is FINE.