A former GOP counsel to the House Oversight Committee during a Monday MSNBC appearance pinpointed White House senior adviser and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner's role in the pro-Trump Sinclair promo controversy.
As news on Sinclair's "must-run" segments — which require anchors at most of their hundreds of stations across the country to read scripts that decry "fake news" in a manner reminiscent of the president — made headlines this weekend, author and former GOP operative Sophia Nelson reminded MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace that Kushner struck a deal with the broadcasting company during the campaign that resulted in coverage favorable to then-candidate Donald Trump.
In December 2016, Politico reported that Kushner admitted to business executives after his father-in-law's victory that he traded access to Trump for unfettered, non-opinionated campaign coverage on Sinclair affiliates. As Nelson noted, Kushner acting as the company's cheerleader in the White House is just another reason he shouldn't be there.
"Why is he still there?" she mused. "Here is a guy who has security clearance issues, he's meddling in the Middle East, he's meddling in Saudi Arabia. He's meddling now with television, FCC things and Sinclair and they're cutting deals. What is this guy doing at the White House?"
"This is not Trump and the Trump business," Nelson continued. "This is the United States of America. This is the White House. This is our country and you can't do here what you were able to do on Wall Street in New York or wherever you did it and that's the problem I have."
Nelson, whose book "E Pluribus One" focused on the Founding Fathers' vision of America and was released just before Trump's inauguration, said the issue "goes back to 'we the people.'"
"What in the hell is wrong with us that we continue to just sit here and act like this is okay?" she wondered. "It's not okay!"
Wallace noted that Nelson appeared passionate about the subject, to which she replied, "I'm fired up."
Watch below, via MSNBC: