if it had been his own family who had been caught up in his watergate mess? would he have cut them off too? separated himself off from them too? tried to throw them under the bus to save himself too? can a president, you know, even try? can a president even attempt cutting off his own son-in-law? a man married to his daughter, once we ve learned that is the person of interest in the fbi s investigation? and while i think we can all appreciate this realtime, real life lesson in why we have those nepotism laws after all, is there anything else like this in our history? is there any precedent for this that can tell us what to expect as to what s going to happen next? joining us now is michael beschloss, nbc news presidential historian who knows these things. michael, thank you for being with us, we appreciate it. my pleasure, rachel. so we have had presidential family members involved in governing before.
unpaid employee. critics say the move is in violation of nepotism laws. i think so many things we are talking about we should have issues with, this is not one of them. ivanka is one of his most popular surrogates, so many people felt confident in donald trump because of who she was and her success in business and all to the table, bobby kennedy was a the under jfk. how is this nepotism when she is taking an unpaid position and that is and? that is preposterous. dagen: the first lady role, why didn t ivanka play some of that? i was making a short list of people who benefited, going back to john quincy adams who was appointed by his father,
they did it. very effective. there s so much more to do. all the way up to mr. trump himself. he has to now admit he is also subject to the constitution which of course he refuses to do. jason miller, the white house says the nepotism laws don t apply because she work in the white house. the justice department agrees. the law is murky on this case. whatever the law, you worked for ted cruz, jason miller. would ivanka trump get this role, assistant to the president, on parallel with the chief of staff in the ted cruz administration? ivanka trump is highly call tied to be in any administration. how lucky are we to have a woman who took a company from scratch and come into the administration and work for free. she brings a great point of view on family leave or climate change or give perspectives.
now that she s an employee, she s more beholden to it. the only legal recourse you have is you can t get a salary if you don t follow them. well, she doesn t have a salary, so there s not really a whole lot of recourse you can have. hillary clinton back in 93 had to do the same sort of dance with the court of appeals when she said can i serve on the task force for health reform for then president clinton and they said, again, the white house as an own agency does not need to follow the nepotism laws. you re been doing reporting on the shakeup at the white house. the deputy white house steve of staff moving out. i think it s sort of an open secret that the folks who were at the rnc and are now at the white house have been pretty frustrated. it kind of makes the trains run on time. health care was a disaster. it s not as organized as it should be inside the white house.
she is the daughter of the president. she is working for free. she is volunteering her time. because she is not collecting a salary it skirts nepotism laws? everybody from the white house counsel to the doj says this doesn t violate nepotism rules. we should be heralding the fact. answer that, norm. for decades, doj and the white house and in the obama white house where i worked, enforced this rule and the bush white house held that nepotism law and it did apply to the white house. the better reading of the law it does apply. whether the law applies or not, it is not a good idea to have these two kids who have no government experience whatsoever. that s good. look what the political professionals have done? they skrucrewed up.