White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, who is married to President Donald Trump's daughter Ivanka, is rejecting claims that he has been operating a "shadow task force" working on the federal coronavirus response, instead insisting he's working at the direction of Vice President Mike Pence, the leader of the White House coronavirus task force.
"If some people are talking to you, that means they're probably not informed as to what is going on," Kushner, a former New Jersey real estate developer and investor told NBC News' Geoff Bennett, who asked him Thursday about reports that have described his role as "being something of running a shadow task force."
The question came after a story in The Washington Post last month that said Kushner has created his own team, including private industry representatives and government allies, to shadow the official coronavirus task force, resulting in confusion in the White House's response to the pandemic.
"The president asked the vice president to run the task force," Kushner told Bennett Thursday. "The vice president asked me to assist. I've been serving, really, at the direction of the vice president."
He said Pence has asked him to get involved in "different projects" and that they speak "sometimes 5-10 times a day, but everything that I'm doing is at the direction of the vice president."
He also said he speaks with the team's medical experts, Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci, along with Pence and Trump "multiple times a day to make sure I'm accomplishing and focusing on the objectives that the vice president deems a priority."
Trump, meanwhile, stepped in to tell Bennett that the claims come from "fake sources" or that maybe the sources "don't exist."
"I've read about it for a long time," he said. "I've been reading about it, fake sources," he said.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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