NEW YORK - Ivanka Trump, the elder daughter of President Donald Trump, will become an official government employee, joining her husband Jared Kushner in serving as an unpaid adviser to her father in the White House.
The announcement on Wednesday amounts to the formal recognition of the value Trump places on the judgement and loyalty of both his daughter and his son-in-law. While relying on family members for advice is hardly unusual for a president, giving them a formal role has few precedents.
Ivanka Trump, 35, will be an assistant to the president; Kushner, 36, has the title of senior adviser.
When questions were raised about whether Kushner’s appointment violated federal anti-nepotism laws, the Justice Department wrote a memo in January concluding that the rules did not apply to the White House.
Ivanka Trump said last week that she planned on serving as an informal adviser to her father, and she already has an office in the West Wing upstairs from her husband’s. She was also in the process of receiving government-issued security clearance and communications devices. But that plan had prompted criticism from ethics experts, who had said it would allow her to avoid financial disclosure rules.
“This arrangement appears designed to allow Ms Trump to avoid the ethics, conflict-of-interest and other rules that apply to White House employees,” Norman L Eisen and Richard W Painter, White House ethics lawyers for Presidents Barack Obama and George W Bush, respectively, wrote in a letter to Donald F McGahn II, the White House counsel.
They had argued that Ivanka Trump’s use of those resources had made her a federal employee in all but name, and they had called on the administration to officially acknowledge her as a staff member.
“I have heard the concerns some have with my advising the president in my personal capacity while voluntarily complying with all ethics rules, and I will instead serve as an unpaid employee in the White House Office, subject to all of the same rules as other federal employees,” Ivanka Trump said in a statement on Wednesday.
“Throughout this process I have been working closely and in good faith with the White House counsel and my personal counsel to address the unprecedented nature of my role,” she said.
Ivanka Trump’s lawyer, Jamie S Gorelick, said that “she will file the financial disclosure forms required of federal employees and be bound by the same ethics rules that she had planned to comply with voluntarily”.
Trump stepped down from her namesake branding and licensing business when her husband joined the administration.
Questions about conflicts of interest related to those businesses have trailed Trump since her father won the presidency. In December, The New York Times reported that she had attended her father’s meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan even as her company was finalising a deal with an apparel company whose largest shareholder was a Japanese government-owned bank. (The deal was later called off.)
To minimize future conflicts of interest, The Times reported last week, Trump had transferred her brand’s assets into a trust overseen by her brother-in-law, Josh Kushner, and sister-in-law, Nicole Meyer. And she enlisted the help of Gorelick, a prominent Democrat who had served as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton.
Under the terms of the trust, Gorelick will review all new deals for Trump’s brand, and flag any potential conflicts of interest to Ivanka Trump, who can exercise veto power or recuse herself from White House business.
Trump had previously separated her personal and business social media accounts, and handed over day-to-day operations of her business to the brand’s president, Abigail Klem.
Critics have accused Trump of using her position in the White House to promote her brand, whose hashtag, #womenwhowork, meshes with her carefully developed image as an advocate for women in the Oval Office. (Photos of Trump posing next to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, or sitting in on meetings with business leaders, have replaced pictures of her shoes and handbags in her Instagram feed.) Those criticisms are only likely to intensify as Trump cements her official role in her father’s inner circle.
Kushner has sold some of his assets, including his stake in the Manhattan skyscraper 666 Fifth Ave, to a family trust of which he is not a beneficiary, according to Gorelick. And she said Kushner does not have any involvement with the Kushner Cos, his family’s real estate development firm.
People close to Trump said her official title would not mean a discernible shift from the unofficial influence she has exercised with her father.
Hope Hicks, a White House spokeswoman, referred to Ivanka Trump as “first daughter” and said her service as an unpaid employee “affords her increased opportunities to lead initiatives driving real policy benefits for the American public that would not have been available to her previously”.
During the presidential campaign, Ivanka Trump was an advocate for a federal maternity leave policy as well as for affordable child care. Since her father’s election, she has coordinated a women’s economic council meeting that involved Trudeau, whom she later accompanied, along with his wife, to a Broadway play. And Trump will meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, with whom her father held a tense Oval Office visit and news conference two weeks ago.
While Ivanka Trump’s portfolio appears fairly circumscribed, Kushner has broadened his. He is Donald Trump’s point man with some foreign governments and in working for Middle East peace, and he is at the helm of a new White House Office of American Innovation, which seeks to bring private sector concepts into the West Wing to streamline a bureaucracy whose upper echelons the president has so far left largely vacant.
Perhaps more significantly, Ivanka Trump and her husband, along with the president’s top economic adviser, Gary D Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive, provide the moderate political ballast against an economic nationalist wing of the White House led by Stephen K Bannon, the chief strategist, and policy adviser Stephen Miller.
In the past, both Ivanka Trump and Kushner leaned Democratic in their politics, forged in the corridors of liberal power in Manhattan where they lived until January. They held a fundraiser for Sen Cory Booker, D-N.J, and both asked the president not to rescind an executive order by President Barack Obama offering legal protections to gays.