UNITED NATIONS — President Trump’s daughter Ivanka went to the U.N. Friday for a private lunch with Secretary-General António Guterres — in what she later said was a discussion on “women’s economic empowerment, entrepreneurship, and workforce development.”
Trump met with Guterres on U.N. HQ’s 38th floor for almost two hours and left through the main doors without talking to gathered reporters.
As she left, one reporter (apparently sarcastically) yelled out: “Did you meet with the Russian Ambassador?” The remark was met with giggles from a few nearby reporters and photographers.
But the entrepreneur later posted on Facebook that the meeting was about women’s empowerment, and was to follow up on the launch of the Women Entrepreneurs Finance Initiative — a World Bank project that she had supported and that would attempt to make $1 billion in capital to help women’s empowerment.
Mrs. Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, have shown a greater propensity for more liberal and globalist ideas, and are much more likely to show support for the world body than her father — whose administration has taken a tough line on the U.N. and proposed significant funding cuts to the U.S. contributions to its operations.
Trump’s daughter has been shown to have significant sway within the West Wing, and the U.N. may have hoped that the meeting would give Guterres a chance to encourage Mrs. Trump to dissuade the president from his planned cuts.
Despite the limited details in Mrs. Trump’s Facebook post, it was significantly more than what was provided by the U.N. The lunch was not on the Secretary-General’s schedule and a spokesman for Guterres told Breitbart News that the meeting was a “private lunch” and that there would be no readout of the event.
A spokesman for U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley did not return a request for comment, but a White House official told Reuters that the talks were being coordinated with Haley’s office.
This is not the first time the U.N. has been hesitant to provide information on meetings between its officials and other groups or officials. This month Breitbart News reported on a meeting between the Clinton Foundation’s head of foreign policy and U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed.
At that time a spokesman for the Secretary-General said the meeting was “part of the ongoing effort to engage and mobilize support from different development partners and stakeholders for the implementation of the 2030 Development Agenda.” A readout was not provided, nor did the Clinton Foundation respond to multiple requests for comment from Breitbart News.
Adam Shaw is a Breitbart News politics reporter based in New York. Follow Adam on Twitter: @AdamShawNY
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