Former US President Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, who tried to portray themselves as selfless public servants by declining to take public paychecks while serving as White House advisers to the President, earned between $172 million and $640 million in outside income from myriad business interests during their four years in the Trump administration, a watchdog group has said.
According to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), the exact earnings of the ex-president’s daughter and son-in-law, who last year bought a $30 million mansion on a Florida island, are difficult to determine because “the income is sometimes in reported in broad ranges” and covered several months before they joined the White House, Huff Post has reported.But even at the lower end of the estimated scale, the couple’s income works out to around $43 million per year ― or $21.5 million each, CREW said.
Most Trump White House advisers were paid $183,000 per year.The majority of Ivanka Trump’s income (around $13 million) came from her ownership stake in the Trump Hotel in Washington, according to CREW. The group described the hotel as “the locus of influence-peddling in the Trump administration.”
Ivanka Trump’s attainment of “foreign trademarks to use after leaving the White House may have been her biggest accomplishment,” the group added. Russian, Chinese and Japanese authorities renewed or approved trademarks while her father was in office.
Jared Kushner, meanwhile, saw his stake in real estate investment platform ‘Cadre’ soar from being worth between $5 million to $25 million at the beginning of Trump’s administration to between $25 million to $50 million at the end, according to the group.