Ivanka Trump is coming under fire for a fully disclosed, completely unpaid and entirely legal role in the White House advising President Donald Trump on key issues.
Meanwhile, another first daughter is collecting huge paychecks for… well… no one’s really sure.
Yet while Trump is being viciously attacked, Chelsea Clinton’s latest cushy gig is getting no media attention at all!
Clinton, who has no apparent expertise in either travel or technology, was just granted a seat on the board of directors of high-tech travel company Expedia.
That’s a website where you can book discount flights, rental cars, hotel rooms and such.
Why? No one knows exactly… but that hasn’t stopped some of the Clinton family’s harshest critics from wondering out-loud if it’s part of a huge kickback scheme.
It’s run by Barry Diller, the liberal billionaire and longtime Democratic supporter who called the election of Donald Trump “an evil miracle.”
As a board member, Clinton will get $250,000 a year in the company’s stock options plus another $45,000 a year in cash.
While most of the board members are heavy hitters with a track record in tech, travel, media and/or investing, Clinton has degrees in history, international relations and public health.
But she does bring to the table at least one unique track record: She has experience cashing big checks for jobs that appear far beyond her qualifications!
She collected $600,000 a year from 2011-2014 as a “special correspondent” for NBC News doing puff pieces like a report on the healing power of horses.
That’s when her mother was already widely considered the 2016 front-runner – and even normally Clinton-friendly reporters had to admit that Chelsea got the job because of her last name.
“If that name hadn’t been connected to American royalty, she could have expected to rake in between $100,000 and $200,000 as a first-year network correspondent, a job that people from less-high-profile families snare only through years and years of tireless work covering the news,” wrote the Washington Post’s Erik Wemple in 2013.
And that’s still not the only eyebrow-raising spot on her resume.
She currently sits on the board of another tech company – also run by Diller – called IAC Interactive, which owns About.com, Dictionary.com and the left-wing news site The Daily Beast.
Again, she is sitting on a board filled with heavy hitters, in this case including former Disney CEO Michael Eisner and former Warner Music CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr.
Again, she appears wildly out of place by any objective measure.
And again, she collects big money for the job: just under $250K in stock and $45,000 per year in cash.
Why? More importantly, why is the media obsessing over Ivanka Trump’s completely above-board and highly visible role as one of her father’s key informal advisors (something that’s been true for much of her adult life), while ignoring all this soft money being thrown at Chelsea Clinton?
Hillary Clinton may have lost the election, but there’s talk she may run for mayor of New York City and possibly even seek the presidency again.
There’s even talk that Chelsea Clinton may be running for political office in the near future, although she denies it.
Given those reports, it seems unlikely that a well-connected politically active billionaire is simply hiring the former first daughter for her expertise. Instead, he may be trying to get on the good side of a powerful liberal family eyeing one more political comeback.
And when you consider his deep connections in those circles, maybe he knows something the rest of us don’t.
— The Horn editorial team