Valeri Jarret Moves into the Obamas’ DC Home-Unproven!
Summary of eRumor:
President Obama’s former top White House Advisor Valorie Jarret has moved into the Obamas’ Washington, D.C., mansion to work in a newly created “nerve center” to disrupt President Trump’s time in office.
The Truth:
Reports that Valerie Jarret has moved into the Obamas’ D.C. mansion stem from a Daily Mail article that attributed that scoop to one unnamed (and unverifiable) source.
The report appeared at the Daily Mail website under the headline, “EXCLUSIVE: Barack Obama’s Close Confidante Valerie Jarrett has Moved into His New DC Home, which is Now the Nerve Center for their Plan to Mastermind the Insurgency against President Trump.” The article begins by describing Valorie Jarret’s relationship with the Obamas during their time in the White House before citing an unnamed source with the “scoop” deep into the story:
A spokesman said the former president thinks they’re ‘citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake.’
After Obama left office, Jarrett moved all her White House belonging into the Kalorama mansion.
‘There was never any doubt that Valerie would have a suite of rooms in the house that the Obama’s are renting,’ said the source. ‘Obama trusts her judgment more than any other person on the planet, as does Michelle.
Obama doesn’t make a decision without her.’
Spurred on by Jarrett and Michelle, the ex-president has come to embrace his role as the leader of the opposition against Trump, whose policies he loathes and whose presidency he considers illegitimate.
‘He is going to use his immense popularity with the half of the country that identifies as liberals and progressives,’ said the Obama family source. ‘Millions of Americans are energized and ready to take to the streets to oppose Trump, but they need to be organized and have their anger focused and directed.
There’s no way to confirm reports that Valerie Jarret has moved in with the Obamas — or that Jarret and the Obamas are leading the anti-Trump “resistance” from the D.C. mansion because the story cites one unnamed source, and there’s no indication that the Daily Mail went through the important journalistic step of independently verifying the unnamed source’s information before reporting it. Still, the report was quickly picked up and repeated. FOX News, Breitbart and Alex Jones all re-reported the story in the days that followed.
In reality, not much information has been made public about what, exactly, Valerie Jarret has been up to since leaving the White House. In December 2016, Jarret told the Chicago Tribune that she didn’t have definite plans after her time in the White House:
She said that after the Obamas leave the White House she plans to relax and get reacquainted with relatives. She said she had no firm professional plans but expects to “roam” between Chicago, Washington and perhaps two or three other places.
“We’ll see,” Jarrett said. “I haven’t made any firm plans on what I’m going to do next.”
In January, the Chicago Tribune (Valerie Jarret’s hometown newspaper) reported that Jarret had signed with one of Hollywood’s top talent agencies, CAA:
What next for the Obamas’ “first friend” Valerie Jarrett, who has been coy about whether she intends to run for office now that she’s out of the White House?
The answer became only a little clearer Tuesday, when Hollywood talent agency CAA announced that it had signed her.
“You’ll have to ask CAA — that’s what I have an agent for,” Jarrett told Chicago Inc. by phone. But CAA, alas, wasn’t much more forthcoming first thing Tuesday.
Speaking last summer, Jarrett said her initial post-White House plans were to “go home and then I will go to sleep, and then I’ll figure out what to do after that,” adding “we’ll see,” when asked if she planned to run herself. She gave a similarly non-committal answer in an interview earlier this month.
Whatever her long-term plans, it’s not hard to imagine Jarrett taking a role at one of the cable networks, which are always hiring, or penning a book about her White House years.
So, Valerie Jarret’s post-White House plans had not been made clear at the time the rumor that Jarret had moved into the Obamas’ DC mansion went viral. And given that the Daily Mail didn’t name a source, or independently verify the information provided by the source (a key step in the journalistic process), claims that Jarret moved in with the Obamas remain unproven.