When the Kushner Companies purchased 666 Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan in early 2007 for a record-breaking price of $1.8 billion, it was supposed to be a center of their real estate portfolio. Instead, the Kushners have struggled to cover their debt on the troubled building since shortly after its purchase on the eve of the financial crisis. As Jared Kushner’s father-in-law, Donald J. Trump, was running for President, the Kushners were pitching Qatari investors to help bail out the building. And just weeks after his father Charles reportedly failed to reach a deal with Qatar’s minister of finance, Jared Kushner, in his capacity as a senior adviser to President Trump, reportedly played a central role in supporting a blockade of Qatar by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Kushner never disclosed his meeting with Saudi Arabia and the UAE on the blockade to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson at the time. Later, a financial company tied to Qatar brokered an especially valuable deal to rescue the Kushner Companies’ property at 666 Fifth Avenue.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
'They Made Me More Dangerous': Frank James Blames NY Mayor for Breakdown
https://www.newsweek.com/they-made-me-more-dangerous-frank-james-blames-ny-mayor-breakdown-1697466
A 62-year-old who uploaded dozens of videos on YouTube, criticizing New York's mayor as violent crimes in the subway continued to increase, has been identified as a person of interest in the Brooklyn subway shooting.
New York authorities are actively searching for Frank R. James as a "person of interest" in connection to the shooting. James' social media presence warned of the dangers lurking in New York's subways and how the state's mental health programs have contributed to the uptick in crimes.
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
JARED KUSHNER’S REAL-ESTATE FIRM SOUGHT MONEY DIRECTLY FROM QATAR GOVERNMENT WEEKS BEFORE BLOCKADE
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/02/jared-kushner-real-estate-qatar-blockade/
The failure to broker the deal would be followed only a month later by a Middle Eastern diplomatic row in which Jared Kushner provided critical support to Qatar’s neighbors. Led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a group of Middle Eastern countries, with Kushner’s backing, led a diplomatic assault that culminated in a blockade of Qatar. Kushner, according to reports at the time, subsequently undermined efforts by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to bring an end to the standoff.
The news of Kushner Companies’ direct pitch to the Qatari government puts a Wednesday report from the Washington Post into broader context. U.S. intelligence services, the paper reported, had determined that officials in four countries — the United Arab Emirates, China, Israel, and Mexico — had been privately discussing how to use Jared Kushner’s real-estate investments as a way to gain leverage over him in order to influence official U.S. policy.
Jared Kushner’s hidden genius? To make terrible decisions – yet keep failing upwards
That’s not Kushner’s only victory. While he might have the charisma of a soggy tissue, Mr Ivanka Trump seems to have a knack for failing upwards. In 2007, for example, a 26-year-old Kushner urged his family’s real estate company to pay a then-record $1.8bn to purchase 666 Fifth Avenue, a skyscraper in Manhattan. This turned out to be a terrible decision. It might have had devastating financial consequences for the Kushner family had it not been for a sudden stroke of luck: in 2018, in the middle of Trump’s presidency, a Canadian asset-management company, Brookfield Asset Management, agreed to take a 99-year lease on the building, paying a huge amount of rent upfront. Funnily enough, the Qatar Investment Authority was a major investor in Brookfield and, at the time, Kushner was backing a blockade on the Gulf kingdom. This was all a complete coincidence, and there was no intention of persuading Kushner to reverse his support for the blockade, Qatar has stressed. And, to be fair, the blockade wasn’t lifted until this year. Still, if Kushner keeps running into coincidences like that one imagines his investment firm will do very well indeed.
How the Kushner Family’s Real Estate Fumble May Entangle Trump’s White House
https://fortune.com/2017/09/02/jared-kushner-5th-avenue-conflict-donald-trump/
Within two years, the global financial crisis had sent New York rents into a tailspin. While Kushner representatives downplay the risk, an exhaustive new report by Bloomberg details how the purchase has since become an albatross. Jared Kushner stepped away from the family business to become a senior adviser to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump, and foreign money may be crucial to salvaging the Kushner investment, raising concerns that Jared Kushner could mix his family’s business with the nation’s.
JARED KUSHNER CEMENTS HIS STATUS AS THE WORLD’S WORST REAL-ESTATE DEVELOPER
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/jared-kushner-worlds-worst-real-estate-developer
The most obvious example of Kushner‘s incompetence, of course, remains his decision to buy 666 5th Avenue, on the eve of the financial crisis, for what was then a record-setting $1.8 billion, putting down a mere $50 million and borrowing the rest. The $1.2 billion loan—of which the Kushner family holds about half, having sold off chunks of the property—is due in February 2019; attempts to shore up cash have ultimately been rebuffed by everyone from the richest man in France, to Israeli insurance companies and banks, to South Korea’s sovereign-wealth fund, to China’s Anbang Insurance Group and the Qataris. And, somehow, the deal continues to look worse and worse by the day. Per Bloomberg:
The Turning of the Tide: The Kashrut Tale of the Swordfish
Based on the ruling of the renowned Sephardic posek, the Knesset haGedolah, Rabbi Chaim ben Yisrael Benvenisti (1603-73),1 who permitted “the fish with the sword,” halakhic decisors over three hundred of the last three hundred and fifty years, repeatedly and uniformly permitted some types of “swordfish.” The first time this was seriously challenged seems to have been by Rabbi Moshe David Tendler, Ph.D., in America in the 1950s. For reasons explored in this paper, his challenge was phenomenally successful. No one growing up Orthodox in the United States during the last forty years would have dreamed of considering the swordfish kosher. Indeed, currently, in every kosher fish list belonging to an Orthodox kashrut organization in America, the swordfish is categorized as non-kosher.2
Jared Kushner gets $2B Saudi investment, drawing Hunter Biden comparisons
Former first son-in-law Jared Kushner received a $2 billion investment from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund — with expected annual management fees of $25 million — according to a new report, drawing comparisons to first son Hunter Biden’s overseas business ventures.
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