Grisham calls Kushner ‘Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit’

Former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham in a forthcoming book described former President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner as “Rasputin in a slim-fitting suit.”

Grisham, who served as the White House press secretary for nine months, is set to release a new book, “I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw in the Trump White House” on Tuesday.

In a section of the book that was adapted and published in Politico on Friday, Grisham criticized Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, for involving themselves in White House decisions, including pushing for a national address on COVID-19 last year.

In the adapted section of the book, Grisham describes how she found out about a meeting that was taking place on March 11, 2020, between Kushner, Hope Hicks and White House counsel Pat Cipollone regarding an apparent need for Trump to give an Oval Office address to the nation on COVID-19. The World Health Organization had just designated the virus as a pandemic.

Grisham explained that a meeting occurred several hours later in the Oval Office so Trump could be briefed on the latest COVID-19 updates. During the meeting, Grisham claimed that his daughter, Ivanka Trump, insisted that the president make an address to the nation on the pandemic. 

Grisham also claimed that Kushner had worked with the president’s speechwriter and “dictated” what the president would say in front of the nation. 

“Katie Miller, an aide to the vice president, was married to speechwriter Stephen Miller. So she went into Stephen’s office and sat there while Jared Kushner frantically dictated the address to Stephen, who wrote something out,” Grisham wrote.

The former White House press secretary expressed her frustration at Kushner for involving himself in the speech, saying “the more I thought about it, the more outraged I grew at Jared’s behavior.” 

“He was not an expert on any of those things — shutting down borders, the economic consequences, the health consequences — yet he alone seemed to be deciding the nation’s first actions to address one of the most devastating crises in our history,” she wrote. 

The Hill reached out to a spokesperson for Trump for comment.

Trump has previously slammed Grisham’s book, including when she claimed that Ivanka Trump and Kushner could not attend a meeting with Queen Elizabeth II due to a lack of helicopter space.

“She became very angry and bitter after her break up and as time went on she was seldom relied upon, or even thought about. She had big problems and we felt that she should work out those problems for herself. Now, like everyone else, she gets paid by a radical left-leaning publisher to say bad and untrue things,” Trump said in a statement to The Hill on Tuesday.