A whistleblower has alleged that Kushner’s business interests are among the reasons career White House personnel security officers recommended that neither he nor his similarly conflicted wife, Ivanka Trump, be given a security clearance – a recommendation President Trump ignored.
Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner made millions in Washington. But at what cost?
First things first: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump should never have been allowed to work in the White House. Anti-nepotism rules exist for a reason, namely so that unqualified relatives of the president are not given jobs in the most important office in the world.
Kushner, the son of a now-pardoned felon and real estate magnate, came to the White House from his previous position as an executive in the family business, often playing the role of slumlord. Yet, he was tasked with solving everything from the opioid crisis to modernizing the federal government to criminal justice reform to Middle East peace to the coronavirus pandemic. He solved almost nothing, but he did reportedly help secure a pardon for his father.
Kushner Companies
In 2017, Nicole Kushner Meyer joined her brother Josh in Kushner Companies, serving as a principal.[32] Meyer was criticized for mentioning her brother's White House position during investor presentations she gave in China when soliciting $150 million for 1 Journal Square in Jersey City, causing her to cancel the rest of her roadshow appearances.[33] In another dispute involving 1 Journal Square, the company is attempting to get $113,659 from the city to cover legal expenses.[34]
According to Bloomberg, the company is facing[when?] an increasingly "distressed situation". Over the last few years, family members have sought substantial overseas investment to deal with "troubled finances".[35]
In the 2010s, developers such as the Kushner Companies widely used the EB-5 visa to fuel a "high-end US residential boom".[36] In May 2017, Trump renewed the visa program in his first major piece of legislation.[37] That September, the United States Attorney's office subpoenaed the Kushner Companies over the use of the EB-5 visa program to fund developments.[38]
In December 2017, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York subpoenaed Deutsche Bank records pertaining to Kushner Companies.[39] The New York Times reported in May 2019 that anti-money laundering specialists in the bank detected what appeared to be suspicious transactions involving entities controlled by Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, for which they recommended filing suspicious activity reports with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the Treasury Department, but bank executives rejected the recommendations. One specialist noted money moving from Kushner Companies to Russian individuals and flagged it in part because of the bank's previous involvement in a Russian money laundering scheme.[40][41]
In 2020, ProPublica and WNYC reported that Kushner Companies received "a near-record sum" from government-backed lender Freddie Mac. The $786 million in loans helped Kushner Companies purchase thousands of apartments in Maryland and Virginia and appeared to come with "unusually good terms," raising conflict of interest questions due to Jared Kushner's role as Senior Advisor to the President of the United States. [42]
Timeline on Jared Kushner, Qatar, 666 Fifth Avenue, and White House Policy
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.
'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
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