Tag: Jared Kushner

Kushner owns lots of Baltimore-area apartments. Some are infested with mice.

Washington Post logoIn a now-viral tweetstorm on Saturday, President Trump characterized Rep. Elijah E. Cummings’s Baltimore-based congressional district as a “rodent infested mess” where “no human” would want to live.

His criticism rang with a particular irony in Baltimore County, where presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner owns more than a dozen apartment complexes that have been cited for hundreds of code violations and, critics say, provide substandard housing to lower-income tenants.

In an interview Saturday, Baltimore County Executive John A. Olszewski Jr. condemned Trump’s comments as “an attack on basic decency.”

View the complete July 28 article by Rebecca Tan on The Washington Post website here.

Adviser, son-in-law and hidden campaign hand: How Kushner is trying to help Trump win in 2020

Washington Post logoAfter Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale decided he wanted to make the recruitment of donors a top strategy in President Trump’s 2020 reelection bid, his first conversation was with someone not officially employed by the campaign at all: Jared Kushner.

Parscale expected the effort to cost $20 million or more in this year alone, so he knew he had to get buy-in from Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser before moving forward.

“It was something that could make a huge impact on our winning and losing,” Parscale said in an interview. “Once he was onboard, we went together to sell the president.”

View the complete July 26 article by Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Rex Tillerson airs concern about Jared Kushner’s secret dealings with foreign leaders

Washington Post logoIn newly disclosed testimony, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson said President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, operated independently with powerful leaders around the world without coordination with the State Department, leaving Tillerson out of the loop and in the dark on emerging U.S. policies and simmering geopolitical crises.

In a transcript of his testimony to the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Tillerson also described the challenge of briefing a president who does not read briefing papers and often got distracted by peripheral topics, noting he had to keep his message short and focus on a single topic.

“I learned to be much more concise with what I wanted to bring in front of him,” Tillerson tol

View the complete June 27 article by John Hudson and Josh Dawsey on The Washington Post website here.

Jared Kushner’s ‘deal of the century’ fails to materialise in Bahrain

Senior adviser to Trump found no interest in his proposals for ending Israel/Palestine conflict

In the end, the ‘deal of the century’ was little more than a failed clearance sale. Jared Kushner arrived in Bahrain touting bedrock principles at untenable discounts. And even then there were no buyers.

The conference that was supposed to offer a new way out of the malaise of the Israel/Palestine conflict provided little of the sort. Its central premise of prosperity as a precursor to a lasting solution barely appeared to register on either side of the separation wall.

In Ramallah and Gaza, there was very little interest in the Trump administration’s proposals. Even in Israel, local media played down the gathering and did nothing to ramp up expectations.

View the complete June 26 article by Martin Chulov on The Guardian website here.

Forget peace. Trump and Israel want Palestinian surrender.

Washington Post logoIt’s tough to recall a recent U.S. diplomatic initiative as universally derided as Jared Kushner’s “Peace to Prosperity” workshop held in Bahrain. President Trump’s son-in-law and chief Middle East adviser convened the two-day event, which ends Wednesday, as a key plank of his drive to forge the “ultimate deal” between the Israelis and Palestinians. But to a wide range of American, Palestinian and Israeli experts, the proceedings in Bahrain’s capital, Manama, illustrated everything that’s wrong with the White House’s approach to Mideast peace.

On paper, Kushner’s vision for raising $50 billion in investment in the region for a raft of infrastructure and business projects may seem unobjectionable. But the source of these funds remains unclear and unlikely to be resolved this week. Moreover, a significant number of the proposals detailed in a 96-page pamphlet released by the White House this past weekend are revising or rehashing old plans already dreamed up by foreign governments, the World Bank, the Rand Corp. and others. These efforts mostly failed, noted my colleague Claire Parker, “in the absence of a mutually satisfying political agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians.” Continue reading “Forget peace. Trump and Israel want Palestinian surrender.”

Palestinians rally against Kushner’s economic peace plan

GAZA/RAMALLAH (Reuters) – Palestinians burned portraits of President Donald Trump as they protested in both the Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Monday against U.S.-led plans for a conference on their economy in Bahrain.

Many Palestinian business groups have said they will boycott the June 25-26 event, billed as part of Washington’s long-awaited Israeli-Palestinian peace plan and spearheaded by Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner.

“Down with Bahrain, down with Trump, down with the Manama conference,” chanted crowds in Gaza, which is ruled by the armed Islamist group Hamas. Some burned large paintings of Trump marked with the words: “Deal of the devil”.

View the complete June 24 article by Nidal al-Mughrabi and Rami Ayyub on the Reuters website.

Deutsche Bank Faces Criminal Investigation for Potential Money-Laundering Lapses

New York Times logoFederal authorities are investigating whether Deutsche Bank complied with laws meant to stop money laundering and other crimes, the latest government examination of potential misconduct at one of the world’s largest and most troubled banks, according to seven people familiar with the inquiry.

The investigation includes a review of Deutsche Bank’s handling of so-called suspicious activity reports that its employees prepared about possibly problematic transactions, including some linked to President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, according to people close to the bank and others familiar with the matter.

The criminal investigation into Deutsche Bank is one element of several separate but overlapping government examinations into how illicit funds flow through the American financial system, said five of the people, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the inquiries. Several other banks are also being investigated.

View the complete June 19 article by David Enrich, Ben Protess and William K. Rashbaum on The New York Times website here.

Democrats ask Office of Special Counsel to review if Kushner violated the Hatch Act

Two House Democrats on Monday asked a federal watchdog to investigate whether Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of President Donald Trump and one of his senior advisers, violated the Hatch Act, a law which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities in their official duties.

Reps. Don Beyer of Virginia and Ted Lieu of California asked the independent Office of Special Counsel (OSC), a federal watchdog agency not to be confused with the now-defunct office of special counsel, to launch an investigation to determine if Kushner violated the statute in the wake of news reports that claimed he has been engaging in campaign fundraising activities from the White House.

The lawmakers cited a report published in the New York Times that claimed Kushner recently organized a meeting at the White House with Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and “a group of big donors” to discuss the fundraising strategy for 2020. They also pointed to a Yahoo News report that alleged Kushner is “the campaign’s key liaison in the West Wing” and has “multiple daily conversations” with Parscale.

View the complete June 18 article by Shira Tarlo from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Harvard professor lays out why the conflicts surrounding Jared Kushner ‘have only grown more distressing with time’

A real estate firm owned in part by Jared Kushner reportedly received $90 million in foreign funding from “an opaque offshore vehicle” after the son-in-law of President Donald Trump began working as a senior adviser at the White House.The company in question, Cadre, has received overseas investments while Kushner “through a vehicle run by Goldman Sachs in the Cayman Islands,” according to the Guardian. Although Kushner sold other assets after beginning his employment at the White House, financial disclosures indicate that he maintained his stake in Cadre, which is now worth as much as $50 million.Because much is unknown about the nature of who has been investing in Cadre, experts have raised concerns that Kushner’s interest in the company could interfere with his ability to impartially represent America’s best interests in geopolitical situations. During his time in the White House, Kushner has taken a lead on foreign policy initiatives, including a well-publicized attempt to broker peace in the Middle East.

“The conflicts that have swirled around Jared Kushner have only grown more distressing with time,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe told Salon by email.

“Besides being the president’s son-in-law, he is a scion of a family, whose wealth is intertwined with Jared’s many roles in the Trump administration, roles that have put him virtually in bed with, among other bloody despots, Saudi Crown Prince MBS, with whom Jared hobnobbed right after MBS sent a team of thugs to brutally torture, murder and dismember a Washington Post critic of the Saudi regime. It would take a long time to enumerate the conflicts we know about. Those we don’t yet know about are neatly hidden away in the Cadre company, in which Kushner apparently has holdings valued at as much as $50 million.”

View the complete June 11 article by Matthew Rozsa from Salon on the AlterNet website here.

Kushner Proved He Is A Security Risk — Again

Some blessed day, America will be rid of the Trump administration. But the “normalization” of misconduct by this president’s entourage will leave indelible stains — one of which will bear the name Jared Kushner.

Unlike his constantly blithering and blabbering father-in-law, Kushner usually goes about his self-serving business in the White House very quietly, hiring lawyers to spout his alibis. When he granted an interview the other day to Axios on HBO, the result was predictable. This epitome of nepotism demonstrated once again why he should hold no public position of trust.

Although Kushner was mocked for his evasions and denials when Axios correspondent Jonathan Swan asked him about Trump’s bigoted “birther” campaign and attacks on Muslims, that was a sideshow. Nobody can expect him to speak frankly about those topics, and his opinions about the president don’t matter anyway.

View the complete June 5 article by Joe Conason on the National Memo website here.