Trump’s ex-chief of staff says Ivanka and Jared Kushner must be ‘dealt with’ in White House

Donald Trump’s family was an “influence” that frequently needed to be “dealt with” as top White House officials constructed policy, the president’s former chief of staff has revealed.

John Kelly discussed his attempts to create a more orderly system in Mr Trump’s turbulent White House in an interview with Bloomberg Television's The David Rubenstein Show released Tuesday, saying he was forced to remove some “very disruptive” officials “to staff a president the way I think a president should be staffed.”

Without mentioning the president’s daughter or son-in-law by name, Mr Kelly singled out Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner by saying members of Mr Trump’s family serving in the White House were “an influence that has to be dealt with,” before noting he was not referring to the first lady.

“By no means do I mean Mrs Trump,” he said, adding, “the first lady’s a wonderful person.”

Discussing the tumultuous turnover rate and top-level departures throughout his tenure as chief of staff, Mr Kelly said he was taken aback by the “intense personal ambition” some staffers displayed, through the removals ultimately formed a staff united behind the president’s agenda.

Tensions between Mr Kelly and the president’s family have long been known, with outlets having described numerous clashes between Mr Trump’s appointees and family during his stint in the administration.

After leaving his post last year, it was recently reported the former White House chief of staff joined a board of directors for Caliburn International, which owns Comprehensive Health Services, a company overseeing some of the nation’s largest and most notorious detention centres housing migrant children.

Mr Kelly faced unending controversy during his time in the West Wing for overseeing the implementation of the president’s zero tolerance policy, which began the systematic separation of migrant families seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border.

Nationwide protests and backlash on Capitol Hill as video footage and photo evidence showed awful conditions at detention centres along the border eventually forced the administration to walk back the policy, with Mr Trump signing an executive order to officially end the separation process in June 2018.

Jess Morales, chair of the migrants’ rights group Families Belong Together, lambasted Mr Kelly’s record in a statement to The Independent after it was revealed he had joined the board of directors at Caliburn.

“John Kelly and the family separation policy he enabled will go down in the history books as a stain on our nation’s moral character,” she said. “He shouldn’t be able to get a job ever again. If a company sees John Kelly’s experience terrorising thousands of children and putting babies in cages as a job qualification, it cannot be trusted to care for children.”