Presidential adviser Jared Kushner said Tuesday that he’s spent much of his time in the White House “cleaning up the messes” created by former Vice President Joseph R. Biden, the Democratic front-runner.
In an interview with Israel’s Channel 13 news, Mr. Kushner pushed back on Mr. Biden’s criticism that it was “improper” for President Trump to appoint his daughter Ivanka and Mr. Kushner, his son-in-law, to senior positions in the West Wing.
“He’s entitled to his opinion, but a lot of the work that the president’s had me doing over the last three years has actually been cleaning up the messes that Vice President Biden left behind,” Mr. Kushner said. “I think that President Trump’s entitled to pick his team and, you know, we’ve worked with him for a long time, and I think we’ve done a good job of trying to help him be successful.”
Mr. Kushner, who has been working on a peace plan for the Middle East, said much of his energy at the White House has been devoted to fixing the Obama administration’s foreign-policy mistakes.
“We inherited an ISIS caliphate, Iran was strong, Libya was a mess and a lot of our allies felt abandoned,” Mr. Kushner said. “We worked very hard over the last three years to try and rebuild the Middle East and to put it in a much more stable framing.”
He also said criminal-justice reforms signed into law by Mr. Trump “rolled back a lot of the very harsh laws that were created and partially written by Vice President Biden over 20 years ago, which put a lot of African Americans in prison and really destroyed a generation and did a lot of harm to our country.”
Mr. Biden has been criticized for his role in passing the 1994 crime bill, which was blamed for imposing lengthy prison sentences for nonviolent drug crimes on mostly minority defendants.
At a forum on criminal justice last week, Mr. Trump said his efforts at giving ex-prisoners a second chance should appeal in 2020 to black voters who typically vote overwhelmingly for the Democratic nominee in presidential elections.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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