Jared Kushner, RIP: A Political Obituary for the President's Son-in-Law
Monday, March 19, 2018
By Nomi Prins, TomDispatch | Op-Ed
Jared Kushner, White House Senior Adviser and son-in-law of President Donald
Trump, listens during a meeting between Trump and congressional members in
the Cabinet Room of the White House February 13, 2018, in Washington, DC.
(Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images)
Jared Kushner, White House senior adviser and son-in-law of President Trump,
listens during a meeting between Trump and congressional members in the
cabinet room of the White House, February 13, 2018, in Washington, DC.
(Photo: Alex Wong / Getty Images)
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Here we are a little more than a year into the Trump presidency and his
administration's body count is already, as The Donald might put it,
"unbelievable, perhaps record-setting."
Among the casualties are Secretary of State Rex Tillerson; my former boss at
Goldman Sachs, economic policy chief Gary Cohn; National Security Advisor
Michael Flynn; FBI Director James Comey; White House Press Secretary and
Communications Director Sean Spicer; four other communications directors
including Hope Hicks who, having been Ivanka Trump's confidante, was
elevated to the status of the president's "real daughter" before her own
White House exit; chief strategist Steve Bannon; Chief of Staff Reince
Priebus; a bunch of other instant relics of Trumpian political history, and
a partridge in a pear tree. (Actually, a 200-year-old magnolia uprooted from
the White House grounds thanks to the first lady.)
Responding to Hope Hicks' departure and, perhaps subliminally, the rumored
future exile of son-in-law Jared Kushner, the president typically
half-lamented and half-quipped, "So many people have been leaving the White
House. It's invigorating, since you want turnover. I like chaos. It really
is good. Who's going to be the next to leave? Steve Miller or Melania?"
Melania has been unavailable for comment on her own possible future place
among the fallen of the Trump era. Perhaps, though, she'll hang around and
offer her husband a little comfort in Stormy weather, as rumors continue to
circulate that his perfectly real daughter and her all-too-real husband may
be ousted from the premises.
Not surprisingly, personnel issues seem to be on the president's mind these
days. On March 6th, in the East Room of the White House and flanked by the
Swedish prime minister, he boasted, "So many people want to come in. I have
a choice of anybody. I could take any position in the White House, and I'll
have a choice of the 10 top people having to do with that position.
Everybody wants to be there."
However, with constant media conjectures about yet more departures including
National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster and possibly even White House Chief
of Staff John Kelly, there seems to be a predisposition to move out of, not
into, this Oval Office. In a remarkably short space of time, President Trump
has already achieved a record 43% turnover rate for top-level staff members,
some of whom may be jumping ship in hopes of emerging with reputations
relatively untarred, while avoiding lengthy prison sentences.
As collateral damage in his world mounts, it seems as if the only members of
the Trump Empire, White House division, guaranteed job security are his
lawyers and perhaps Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Even that most
nuclear of families -- his -- seemed in peril of exploding, as the countdown
to Kushner's exit approaches the zero hour. It looks as if we may all have
scored front-row seats for the latest you're-fired episode in the White
House reality show.
Given the not-if-but-when nature of Kushner's departure from the White
House, it's none too soon for media outlets to prepare themselves. With that
in mind, here is a prospective political obituary for him.
Bringing Peace to a Riven World
The political career of Jared Kushner met a slow death from unparalleled
incompetence, conflicts of interest, and financial sleights of hand. He is
survived by his father-in-law Donald Trump and -- though no one knows for
how long -- his wife, Ivanka. At age 37, he had held the role of White House
senior adviser and assistant to the president since the day Donald Trump
entered the Oval Office. Just two months later, his wife agreed to take a
similar advisory position. Though together they were reported to be worth a
mere $740 million, they generously offered to do their new jobs without pay
from a sense of duty to country and the kindness of their hearts -- and also
perhaps to avoid running afoul of an anti-nepotism law passed in 1967 when
Lyndon B. Johnson was president.
Jared's year-plus in the White House proved another Trump-style record
setter, a pro bono financial odyssey of a sort no previous White House had
ever witnessed. While traveling the globe to carry out his "duties" and
hobnob, negotiate, and pose for endless photo-ops with world leaders from
Iraq, China, Israel, and a host of other countries -- a role once upon a
time filled by the secretary of state -- the overworked adviser somehow
found a few moments to cash in his diplomatic air-miles big time.
In his Rolodex of titles, he would also serve as head of a completely
fabricated new entity, the White House Office of American Innovation. In
both capacities, he stood ready to change the world, a goal he achieved
handily -- if the world you happen to be talking about was his own financial
one. And that was no small thing. After all, it's not easy to oversee and
advance (or, in his case, even potentially depth charge) your private
business interests while lending a hand running the country, not to speak of
the world, and freeing your father-in-law to work on his golf stroke.
For example, Kushner attempted to extract from investors in Qatar a modest
half-billion dollars in bailout funds for a cratering Manhattan skyscraper,
666 Fifth Avenue, that he had purchased for his family business while still
in the private sector. Unfortunately, that particular deal fell through,
after which Kushner and his father-in-law happily backed the Saudis in their
blockade and quarantine of Qatar.
Taking his business-oriented focus on the road as the White House liaison
for peace in the Middle East, Kushner was also tasked with the simple goal
of brokering the settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict. His
familiarity with the region was significant since, among other things, he
had gotten at least four major loans from Bank Hapoalim, Israel's largest
bank, for the Kushner family real estate company. (Hapoalim is undergoing a
criminal probe by the US government for tax evasion services it reportedly
provided to its wealthy clients.) Shortly before President Trump's visit to
Israel in May 2017, Kushner Companies also received a $30 million investment
from Menora Mivtachim, one of Israel's largest insurers -- and what could be
more peaceable than that? As everyone knows, Kushner himself left office
just as peace was settling over the region (and the US was moving its
embassy to Jerusalem).
China, of course, had been a longtime target of Donald Trump until -- in a
similarly diplomatic frame of mind -- Kushner helped organize a fabulous
Dover sole dinner at the president's Mar-a-Lago club with Chinese President
Xi Jinping last April. He would also prove to be a key figure in smoothing
the way for better relations with that rising global superpower -- an
approach that just happened to fit perfectly with the Kushner family
business. Only a month after that dinner, for example, his sister, Nicole
Meyer, was already reportedly pitching the glories of One Journal Square, a
Jersey City housing project the Kushner family owns that was in need of $150
million in investments, to a gathering of 100 potential Chinese investors at
the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Beijing. As part of that pitch, while dropping her
brother's name, she offered them a path into the US EB-5 visa program,
sometimes referred to as a "citizenship for sale" program, which they could
enter through Kushner properties for a mere $500,000 each.
Building brilliantly on his Chinese portfolio, Jared Kushner, too, held
private meetings with elite potential Chinese investors in... well,
properties like his family's and spent copious time with the Chinese
ambassador to the US during and after the election campaign. He allegedly
also attended high-level meetings with the chairman of Anbang Insurance
Group during the Trump transition period. At the time, Anbang just
coincidentally was considering making an investment in 666 Fifth Avenue.
Unfortunately, no deal resulted. Since then, the company has been seized by
the Chinese government and its chairman prosecuted for "economic crimes."
For Kushner, refinancing that single building in New York proved no easier
than making peace in the Middle East.
But give him credit: while advising the president, he never stopped looking
out for those closest to him (i.e., his family) and never forgot his role as
a junior mogul on the make. In the process, he entertained a cast of key
bank executives. In an office only doors from the Oval Office, he regularly
connected with some of the biggest players on Wall Street, including those
at bailout-prone Citigroup, scandal-ridden Deutsche Bank, and the
asset-management goliath Blackstone Group. As the Wall Street Journal
reported, he also remained in undisclosed business relationships with
Goldman Sachs, investor George Soros, and billionaire venture capitalist
Peter Thiel. All three had business stakes in a "real-estate tech startup
called Cadre that Kushner co-founded and currently partly owns."
Being the statesman he was, however, there can be little doubt that Kushner
attended such meetings purely to explore the state of banking and investment
for the sake of the economic well-being of the American people. After all,
no portfolio, from the secretary of state's to infrastructure and the opioid
crisis, was beyond his skills.
In his brief time in the White House, one thing can be said: his generosity
of spirit was second to none. He opened his arms to any financial firm that
wanted to help him put the United States on a path back to being great
again. (Whatever multi-million-dollar loans to the Kushner family business
occurred in the process surely represented no more than a random confluence
of events.) Last November, for example, Apollo Global Management, one of the
world's largest private equity firms, loaned $184 million to Kushner's
family real estate company in order to refinance a mortgage on a Chicago
skyscraper. That was after its founder, an adviser to the Trump
administration on "infrastructure," met numerous times with Kushner in the
White House.
When that sum proved less than adequate for the family's dreams, a far
larger company, one that the US government had bailed out during the
financial crisis of 2007-2008, stepped in and offered his family firm an
even bigger loan. It came from Citigroup, which lent Kushner Companies $325
million to help finance office buildings in Brooklyn. As the New York Times
reported, "That loan was made in the spring of 2017, shortly after Mr.
Kushner met in the White House with Citigroup's chief executive, Michael L.
Corbat."
In all such situations, the appearance of impropriety was at best
circumstantial. In his year-plus in the White House, Kushner unfortunately
became the subject of "fake news," above all by reporters pushing the absurd
idea that his family business had somehow profited by his unpaid position in
the Trump administration.
Death in a Revolving Door
Only in February did things start going truly badly for the young
presidential adviser. Having held only an interim top-secret security
clearance for more than a year while his background check stalled
(reportedly due to fears that he might be manipulated by foreign powers over
his family's finances), he was suddenly downgraded to "secret" by White
House Chief of Staff John Kelly, considered anything but a "Javanka" ally.
Such a functional demotion meant that he suddenly had less access to key
documents and crucial information of governing than the White House
calligrapher. In the process, he got pummeled in the media (through no fault
of his own, of course).
President Trump was reportedly "frustrated" by that media browbeating, but
no less so by Kushner himself. the New York Times, Trump now viewed his
son-in-law "as a liability because of his legal entanglements, the
investigations of the Kushner family's real estate company, and the
publicity over having his security clearance downgraded." It even began to
be rumored that the president had privately asked Chief of Staff Kelly to
begin the process of pushing not just Kushner but his own daughter out of
the White House. Given the president's well-documented predisposition to
turn his back on former loyalists, that proved to be the end of the road. In
Trumpian terms, Kushner quickly found himself not six feet out of power, but
six feet under it.
It was with deep regret that Jared Kushner left behind his cozy office at
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and his unfinished masterpiece: peace in the Middle
East (and possibly the world). He did, however, retain the Washington
residence that the first daughter and he had occupied for $15,000 a month.
That humble abode was owned by Chilean mogul Andrónico Luksic, whose mining
company happens to be mired in a dispute with the US government over
billions of dollars (which, it goes without saying, had no bearing on the
Kushners' choice of a dwelling).
In his post-political life, Kushner faces another problem he couldn't solve
while in the White House: by January 2019 the Kushner family organization
needs to cough up $1.2 billion to save its flagship New York property from
defaulting, a building that, despite Kushner's well known savvy when it
comes to... well, everything, has been losing money since it was purchased
for a record $1.8 billion in 2007. Fortunately, who knows better than the
Trump family and by extension the Kushners that, after every possible
investor is exhausted, bankruptcy court is always an option.
In the end, Kushner's White House journey was through a door revolving
around the instability of Donald Trump's judgment.
And so Jared Kushner's political career ended. Of course, he'll always have,
if not Paris, then Jerusalem and the odd trip to Mexico.
He is survived in the White House by his father-in-law and, for the time
being, his wife. Meanwhile, that revolving door continues to spin.
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Nomi Prins
Nomi Prins is a journalist and senior fellow at Demos. Her last book was
Black Tuesday, a novel about corruption and romance surrounding the 1929
stock market crash. Before that she wrote the hard-hitting, It Takes a
Pillage: Behind the Bonuses, Bailouts and Backroom Deals from Washington to
Wall Street (Wiley, September 2009). She is also the author of Other
People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America (The New Press, October
2004), a devastating exposé into corporate corruption, political collusion
and Wall Street deception, chosen as a Best Book of 2004 by The Economist,
Barron's and The Library Journal, and Jacked: How "Conservatives" Are
Picking Your Pocket (Whether You Voted for Them or Not) (Polipoint Press,
Sept. 2006).
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