Tag: Qatar

Inside Giuliani’s dual roles: Power-broker-for-hire and shadow foreign policy adviser

Washington Post logoThe president’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani was on the phone in late 2018, pressing administration officials about his latest agenda item.

President Trump had nominated a career Foreign Service officer to become the U.S. ambassador to Qatar, a key post in a Middle Eastern country with tricky regional relationships, an important U.S. military installation and vast oil reserves.

Giuliani, who has said he had held a cybersecurity contract with Qatar in 2017 and early 2018, proposed replacing her with someone he said would be a better fit — Scott W. Taylor, a Trump-supporting former congressman from Virginia defeated in his reelection bid in November 2018, according to people familiar with his outreach.

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Kushner Sought $500 Million Bailout From Top Qatari Investor: Report

The following article by Eric Levitz was posted on the New York Magazine site July 10, 2017:

Jared Kushner, left, White House senior adviser, listens to President Trump during a meeting with cybersecurity experts at the White House on Jan. 31. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Jared Kushner has no experience in public service or policymaking. His only qualification for his senior White House position (beyond having been born and betrothed to the right people) is the business savvy that allowed him to avoid squandering his family’s enormous fortune (for the moment, anyway).

In 2007, Kushner’s killer instinct told him that the real-estate market had nowhere to go but up. And so the 26-year-old mogul decided to plow $500 million of his family’s money — and $1.3 billion in borrowed capital — into purchasing 666 Fifth Avenue for twice the price it had previously sold for. Even if we’d somehow avoided a global financial crisis, this would have been a bad bet: Before the crash, when the building was almost fully occupied, it generated only about two-thirds of the revenue the Kushners needed to keep up with their debt payments. Continue reading “Kushner Sought $500 Million Bailout From Top Qatari Investor: Report”