The instant histories of the Obama White House tend to portray her as the Obamas' pit bull, a woman loyal only to the president, first lady and her own image. ... Rahm Emanuel, on agreeing to become Obama's chief of staff, recognized that Jarrett would wield such outsized power that he tried unsuccessfully to finesse her into Obama's senate seat. (Alter also speculates that Valerie Jarrett was one reason why Rahm hightailed it out of DC in late 2010 into the relative ease of the Fifth Floor.)You can read a Stanford alumni puff piece here. Judicial Watch points out some skeletons in Jarrett's closet:
Others in media and Washington circles portray Jarrett ... as a brilliant strategist and thinker who practically runs both wings of the White House and who did as much or more than anyone to put the Obamas there. In 1991, Jarrett, then Mayor Rich Daley's deputy chief of staff, offered Michelle Robinson a job in City Hall. Before Michelle accepted, she insisted that Jarrett meet with Michelle's fiancé Barack Obama. Jarrett promptly took both under her wing and, over the years, introduced Barack to the inner Daley circle, to wealthy business people, and to the people who mattered in her enclave, Hyde Park—all of which helped Obama as he moved up from community organizer to Springfield to Washington.
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Valerie Jarrett is not powerful because she creates and implements policy, but because she's the last person the president and/or first lady talk to, sometimes over dinner in their private dining room. It was reportedly the Obamas who persuaded Jarrett not to pursue appointment to the President-Elect's vacated U.S. senate seat, but instead to keep close to them in the White House.
She vacations with the first couple in Hawaii and on the Vineyard, and she can sometimes sound like their flac: Michelle is "fabulous at 50." Barack is "just too talented to do what ordinary people do" (as quoted in David Remnick's The Bridge). She decides who's invited to small White House parties and state dinners.
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Jason Horowitz, then writing about Jarrett for the Washington Post, described "disgruntled Obama donors in the financial industry... [who] have cast Jarrett as insufficiently sophisticated on economic issues and incapable of brooking any dissent about Obama. 'I have always thought she was a liability,' said one prominent investor and donor.... 'I've talked to people in the White House about it, and they have agreed with me, but they are scared to say anything.'"
It was, well, conventional wisdom, that Bill Daley was brought in as Rahm's successor as chief of staff to clean up the administration's messy relationships with business; perhaps understandably, Jarrett did not warm to Daley—and, according to Politico's Glenn Thrush, "frequently shared her unflattering assessments with Obama." Daley's tenure as COS was short.
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Jonathan Alter's reporting revealed someone quite different: "Staffers feared her, but didn't like or trust her. At meetings she said little or nothing, instead lingering afterwards to express her views directly to the President, creating anxiety for her underlings and insulting them by saying, 'I don't talk just to hear myself talking.'"
Derogatory nicknames abound for Jarrett: "Keeper of the Essence," "Night Stalker" (because of her access after hours to the Obamas in their private quarters), "personal custodian of the president's lofty motives and gifts." The latter comes from This Town author Mark Leibovich, who quotes from an apparently leaked memo titled "Magic of Valerie," its 33 talking points circulated to White House staffers ahead of a New York Times Jarrett profile.
The memo cites as her "magic" qualities, "her intellect and her heart. She is an incredibly kind, caring and thoughtful person with a unique ability to pinpoint the voiceless and shine a light on them and the issues they and the President care about.... Valerie has an enormous capacity for both empathy and sympathy. She balances the need to be patient and judicious with the desire to get things done and work as hard as possible for the American people from the White House... Valerie is tapped in to people's experiences, their good times and bad. .... Single mother, woman working to the top in a competitive male dominated world, African-American, working for change from the grassroots to big business.... Valerie is someone here who other people inside the building know they can trust. (need examples.)"
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As Jodie Kantor told me, "I don't think Valerie's ever leaving [the Obamas]. ....She has thrown her entire life into their cause, and she's made it very clear that she would happily run in front of a speeding truck for them.... She has taken the president's and First Lady's success as the defining mission of her being."
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) files obtained by Judicial Watch reveal that the dad, maternal grandpa and father-in-law of President Obama's trusted senior advisor, Valerie Jarrett, were hardcore Communists under investigation by the U.S. government.
Jarrett's dad, pathologist and geneticist Dr. James Bowman, had extensive ties to Communist associations and individuals, his lengthy FBI file shows. In 1950 Bowman was in communication with a paid Soviet agent named Alfred Stern, who fled to Prague after getting charged with espionage. Bowman was also a member of a Communist-sympathizing group called the Association of Internes and Medical Students. After his discharge from the Army Medical Corps in 1955, Bowman moved to Iran to work, the FBI records show.
... The Jarrett family Communist ties also include a business partnership between Jarrett's maternal grandpa, Robert Rochon Taylor, and Stern, the Soviet agent associated with her dad.
Jarrett's father-in-law, Vernon Jarrett, was also another big-time Chicago Communist, according to separate FBI files obtained by JW as part of a probe into the Jarrett family's Communist ties. For a period of time Vernon Jarrett appeared on the FBI's Security Index and was considered a potential Communist saboteur who was to be arrested in the event of a conflict with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). His FBI file reveals that he was assigned to write propaganda for a Communist Party front group in Chicago that would "disseminate the Communist Party line among...the middle class."
It's been well documented that Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago lawyer and longtime Obama confidant, is a liberal extremist who wields tremendous power in the White House. Faithful to her roots, she still has connections to many Communist and extremist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood. Jarrett and her family also had strong ties to Frank Marshal Davis, a big Obama mentor and Communist Party member with an extensive FBI file.
JW has exposed Valerie Jarrett's many transgressions over the years, including her role in covering up a scandalous gun-running operation carried out by the Department of Justice (DOJ). Last fall JW obtained public records that show Jarrett was a key player in the effort to cover up that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress about the Fast and Furious, a disastrous experiment in which the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco Firearms and Explosives (ATF) allowed guns from the U.S. to be smuggled into Mexico so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels. Instead, federal law enforcement officers lost track of hundreds of weapons which have been used in an unknown number of crimes, including the murder of a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Arizona.
In 2008 JW got documents linking Valerie Jarrett, who also served as co-chairman of Obama's presidential transition team, to a series of real estate scandals, including several housing projects operated by convicted felon and Obama fundraiser/friend Antoin "Tony" Rezko. According to the documents obtained from the Illinois Secretary of State, Valerie Jarrett served as a board member for several organizations that provided funding and support for Chicago slum projects operated by Rezko.
Comment: The situation in Manbij is really getting complex: