"Kushner, Raking in Saudi Dough, Targeted by Democrats" by Michael Isikoff
"Raskin, Wyden ask a cautious Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Saudi 'management fees' and foreign activities of the 'shadow diplomat'"
Raskin, Wyden ask a cautious Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate the Saudi 'management fees' and foreign activities of the 'shadow diplomat'
It raised eyebrows a few years ago when Jared Kushner, fresh out of his job overseeing Mideast policy in Donald Trump’s White House, founded an investment firm that quickly collected $2 billion from a Saudi wealth fund at the direction of the country’s de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Does the very busy son-in-law have conflicts of interest?
But it turns out that this giant size kitty isn’t the only way Riyadh is bankrolling Trump’s son in law. As congressional investigators discovered this summer, the Saudi government also has been actively paying Kushner “management” fees on all that money—at least $87 million so far under an arrangement that guarantees him regular fat paychecks from Riyadh as well as other foreign governments, in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, that have also invested in his nascent, Miami-based firm, Affinity Partners.
“That’s the critical element,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, in a new SpyTalk podcast, about the Saudi fees that are continuing to flow into Kushner’s firm.
“I mean, $87 million is an extraordinary sum of money. Most people will not earn that over the course of their whole lives. The idea that Jared Kushner, as the principal foreign policy actor for the Middle East [under] Donald Trump, is not acting in the capacity of a foreign agent, just cries out for correction. It just makes no sense.”
Raskin, along with Senate Finance Committee chairman Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore) , whose investigators discovered the Saudi management fee pipeline, last week wrote a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland asking him to name a special counsel to investigate whether Kushner is serving as an unregistered—and therefore illegal—agent of the Saudi government in violation of the pre-World War II-era Foreign Agent Registration Act (or FARA, as it is commonly known.)
They call him “a shadow diplomat.”
“There is substantial reason to believe that the Saudi government’s decision to engage Affinity for investment advice is a fig leaf fo funneling money directly to Mr. Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump,” Raskin and Wyden wrote in their Oct. 24 letter to Garland.
(Attempts to seek a comment from Kushner on the issues raised by the Wyden-Raskin letter were unsuccessful. Affinity Partners did not respond to requests sent to the media inquiries section of the firm’s website. Kushner has repeatedly said he is merely a private businessman and has no intention to return to the White House if his father in law wins the election.)
Yellow Light
There is, of course, no likelihood that the ever cautious Garland — already keenly sensitive to Republican cries about the supposed “weaponization” of the Justice Department— is going to act quickly on a request to investigate the son-in-law of the Republican candidate for president, much less on the eve of the election. (The department’s press office did not respond to a request for comment from SpyTalk.)
But Raskin and other Democrats do hope to use the issue to highlight the multiple foreign entanglements that continue to surround Trump and his family — investments and business deals that could well loom large and present no end to potential conflicts if the former president is returned to power.
As The New York Times reported this week, Trump and his family have been “cashing in” on multiple overseas ventures in recent years, including signing deals for luxury hotels in Dubai, Riyadh and Oman—not unlike the one he was seeking from the Kremlin in 2016 to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Kushner, though, remains Exhibit A. The Wall Street Journal reported this month that he is currently negotiating a $1 billion deal with the government of Albania to build ultra-luxury resorts on a military island off the coast of that country that once housed a Soviet submarine base. And as SpyTalk reported in June, Kushner’s firm this year inked a $500 million deal with the pro-Russian government of Serbia to build a residential and hotel complex in Belgrade that would include a monument to the “victims of NATO aggression” during the 1999 bombing campaign to stop the slaughter of ethnic Muslims in Kosovo.
That deal kicked off controversy. It was “a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing,” Gen. Wesley Clark, who led the NATO bombing campaign, told me at the time.
But, in Raskin’s view, what makes Kushner’s deals especially egregious—and puts him in potential violation of the foreign agents law—is that he is, by his own admission, continuing to advice Trump and raise money for him, even while he continues to stay in close consultation, and presumably, advise the Crown Prince.
“He’s continued to advise Trump on foreign policy, which suggests that he's certainly not going to be advising Trump to do anything with respect to Saudi Arabia or the Middle East that contradicts Saudi policy,” said Raskin, who represents a Maryland district that borders Washington, D.C.. “And very likely, he's acting as a courier for the views and the interests of Saudi Arabia. And similarly, he advises Saudi Arabia on what's taking place in American politics.
“So, look,” he added, “there's just this network of embedded conflicts of interest that operate around Trump world, and this is one more of them.”
High Hurdles
Sorting through those apparent conflicts—and determining whether his political activities have crossed a line that implicates FARA—would require an aggressive investigation by Justice, including subpoenas and grand jury testimony to discover exactly what Kushner has been talking to Trump and MBS, as the crown prince is known, about.
Such probes are not launched lightly and likely require more substantial predicates than Raskin and Wyden have collected so far. To make a FARA case, the department would need evidence that Kushner was seeking to “influence” U.S. policy or the American public to advance the interests of MBS and his autocratic government. Unlike the hard details about the Saudi management fees, which Democratic investigators got from questioning Affinity’s chief counsel, most of the evidence cited in the Raskin-Wyden letter about Kushner’s continuing political and foreign policy role is based on inevitably vague news stories, such as a recent one from Reuters reporting that Kushner had “discussed” U.S.-Saudi diplomacy “multiple times” with MBS and another from the Wall Street Journal, which quoted him as saying he was “there to fully help and advise” Trump and his team and describing him as playing “an informal advisory role.”
But regardless of the precise details of those talks, and whether they are sufficient to open up a criminal probe, Kushner is far from alone in benefiting from Saudi largesse. Nor is he the only top advisor to a presidential candidate with substantial business interests that can potentially pose conflicts.
Consider Tony West, until recently senior vice president and chief counsel to the tech giant Uber. West also happens to be the brother-in-law of Kamala Harris and, by all accounts, her most trusted advisor. “He’s the chairman of the board,” one top strategist, Bakari Sellers, is quoted as saying by The Washington Post.
West, who earned $43 million from Uber between 2020 and 2023, took a “temporary leave of absence” from the firm when he joined the Harris campaign in August, though he maintains stock holdings worth about $9.2 million.
The business interests of Harris brother-in-law Tony West have also come under scrutiny (YouTube grab)
Whether West will return to Uber after the election—or take a top job in a Harris White House or Justice Department—remains at this stage necessarily unclear. But either way, it is also worth noting that when Uber went public in 2016, it, too, got a large infusion of overseas cash.
One of its big investors: the Saudi sovereign wealth fund controlled by MBS, the very same one that has invested in Kushner’s firm. In the case of Uber, the MBS-controlled fund wired $3.5 billion, making the Crown Prince “the biggest investor in the world's hottest tech startup” and the wire transfer the largest ever recorded, according to this Business Insider account. It was also about $1.5 billion more than MBS gave Kushner several years later.
You can soak up all this in my lively podcast with Raskin on the SpyTalk podcast on Simplecast, Apple, or whatever your preferred listening platform. We’re everywhere.
SpyTalk can publish the great work of Michael Isikoff and other distinguished journalists only through the financial support of readers like you. Give it a shot with a free trial!
