Jared Kushner has problems.
Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators are reportedly interested in the senior White House adviser for a plethora of reasons — including, but not limited to, the central topic of whether the Trump team worked with Russia to interfere with the 2016 campaign.
Meanwhile, Kushner’s security clearance was recently downgraded. For unclear reasons, the FBI has refused to grant him full “top secret” status — throwing his position in the White House into doubt.
Additionally, and probably not coincidentally, more and more questions have been raised about Kushner’s efforts in recent years to drum up investments in his family’s real estate projects — and whether those efforts inappropriately overlapped with his work in the Trump transition or White House.
This week alone, the New York Times reported that Kushner’s family business got big loans from two US financial institutions shortly after he met with their executives in the White House, and the Washington Post reported that foreign officials have discussed using his business entanglements to manipulate him, and NBC News reported Mueller is asking whether the Kushner business influenced Trump’s foreign policy. Meanwhile, and separately from Mueller’s probe, federal prosecutors and state regulators have both recently sought documents on Kushner Companies’ finances.
Looming over so much of this is the fact that the Kushner company owes $600 million on a money-losing Manhattan tower that’s fully due in just one year. The Kushners have spent much of the past few years trying to get wealthy foreigners to finance an expensive redevelopment plan for the property — but so far, all those efforts have failed.
The 37-year-old presidential son-in-law has not been officially accused of anything. There haven’t been any reports that charges against him are imminent. He and Kushner Companies have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing. And for now, Jared continues to hold his high-level White House job, in which he is tasked with, among other things, making peace in the Middle East.
Still, on the political, legal, and business fronts, Kushner’s future looks cloudier by the day. With almost too many controversies and perils to count, here, then, is a guide to the many woes of the senior White House son-in-law.
To understand Jared Kushner, though, you have to first understand where he came from.
The original Kushner family scandal was lurid and ugly
Born in 1981, Jared Kushner grew up in New Jersey amid a family environment of wealth, privilege — and, eventually, scandal.
His father, Charles Kushner, had built what by the early 2000s was a billion-dollar real estate empire in New Jersey and other Northeastern states. Now fabulously rich, Charles handed over big donations to smooth Jared’s way into Harvard (with the help of two United States senators). Charles also became the top donor to Jim McGreevey, the Democratic nominee for governor of New Jersey who won the office in 2001. And he trained Jared in the family business early, helping advise the college student on buying his own real estate.
But a family feud erupted over business and money, splitting Charles Kushner from his brother Murray and his sister Esther. Around the same time, a Kushner Companies bookkeeper filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging illegal political contributions by Charles and other improper financial practices from the company. As a result, the ambitious new US attorney for New Jersey, Chris Christie, started investigating the Kushners.
Believing his relatives were behind all this, Charles did a truly remarkable thing in response: He arranged to pay a prostitute to seduce his sister Esther’s husband, had the ensuing sexual encounter taped and photographed, and sent the tape and photos to Esther. (He arranged for a second prostitute to try to seduce the whistleblowing bookkeeper too, but the guy turned her down.)
It all blew up in Charles’s face — the feds learned of everything, Charles was arrested, and after pleading guilty to tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions, and witness tampering (for the tape), he was sent to jail in 2005.
What did Jared think about all this? Well, in a 2009 interview with Gabe Sherman of New York magazine, Jared stood squarely behind his father — defending Charles’s vicious actions in a revealing comment that prized family loyalty and business success above such petty matters as ethics and following the law.
“His siblings stole every piece of paper from his office, and they took it to the government,” Jared maintained. “Siblings that he literally made wealthy for doing nothing. He gave them interests in the business for nothing. All he did was put the tape together and send it. Was it the right thing to do? At the end of the day, it was a function of saying ‘You’re trying to make my life miserable? Well, I’m doing the same.’ ”
Though the scandal was embarrassing and the subject of enormous media attention, it didn’t keep either Kushner down for long. Charles was released after a year and returned to his company more ambitious than ever, newly setting his sights on New York City properties.
Jared, meanwhile, became the public face of Kushner Companies, spent a reported $10 million to buy a majority stake in the New York Observer newspaper, and began dating fellow real estate scion Ivanka Trump (whom he’d marry in 2009). Eventually, Ivanka would be Jared’s ticket to high-level jobs in Donald Trump’s campaign and White House.
Kushner has risen to the White House — and brought conflicts of interest with him
When Trump decided to name Kushner to a top White House job last year, Jared followed his father-in-law’s lead by doing the bare minimum to disentangle himself from his business interests. He stepped down from his official role at Kushner Companies, but he kept most of his interest in it and his real estate holdings. (He did sell some real estate assets and the Observer, but just to a family trust controlled by his mother.)
Since then, there have been a seemingly endless array of reports about conflicts and questionable activity from either Jared or Kushner Companies, which is privately held and has opaque finances.
Much of this involves one Kushner investment in particular: the skyscraper at 666 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. Back in 2006, Kushner Companies agreed to pay $1.8 billion for the building, setting a new record for the highest price for a single real estate asset ever paid in the United States, and financing it almost entirely through debt near the peak of the housing bubble.
An excellent report from Bloomberg’s David Kocieniewski and Caleb Melby dives deep into what’s happened since: The Kushners had to sell off pieces of the building and have continued to lose money on the 50.5 percent of its office space they still own.
Now, a $1.2 billion mortgage — half of which the Kushners are responsible for — is coming fully due in February 2019. They’ve paid off none of it and could be in danger of losing control of the building. Though company spokespeople insist things are rosy, one “person familiar with the company’s finances” told the Bloomberg duo that the tower was “the Jenga puzzle piece that could set the [Kushner] empire teetering.”
The Kushners came up with an ambitious and enormously expensive redevelopment plan to turn things around by knocking down the tower and building a more modern one in its place. But for that, they needed some very well-off investors. So, per the Bloomberg report, since 2015, they’ve approached a Saudi billionaire, a Qatari business executive, the richest man in France, a South Korean government-controlled sovereign wealth fund, and the Chinese insurance company Anbang — all without success, despite Jared’s best efforts. (Jared dined with Anbang’s chair in New York eight days after the election as discussions were ongoing, while he was playing a major role in the Trump transition.)
Then, this week, more information about the Qatar discussions came to light. The Intercept reported that, in April 2017 (while Jared was in the White House), his father and Kushner Companies made a direct pitch for funds to Qatar’s minister of finance. The deal fell through — and, when a crisis erupted in the Gulf a few months later, Trump conspicuously and oddly contradicted his own Secretary of State to harshly condemn Qatar. NBC News now reports that Mueller has been asking witnesses if Kushner’s business ties improperly influenced the Trump administration’s policies.
The problem is evident: Kushner Companies needs a huge pile of money and is looking for it from foreign sources as Jared holds a foreign policy portfolio in the White House.
But the problems don’t stop with one skyscraper. There’s also:
- Questionable loans: Last year, Apollo Global Management lent $184 million to Kushner Companies and Citigroup lent $325 million — both after executives met with Jared in the White House, the New York Times reports. Meanwhile, Deutsche Bank loaned Kushner Companies $285 million about a month before the 2016 election, and since then, federal prosecutors and state regulators have separately asked the bank for Kushner-related documents. (Kushner Companies has said all these loans were completely normal and in keeping with regular business practices.)
- Questionable investors: One major and, until last year, secret investor in Kushner Companies projects is Raz Steinmetz, the nephew of controversial Israeli diamond mogul Beny Steinmetz, the Times’s Jesse Drucker revealed. Beny is under law enforcement scrutiny in at least four countries, including the US, for potential crimes such as bribery and money laundering. (A Kushner Companies spokesperson told Drucker that Raz “is the only Steinmetz that we have done business with.”)
- Controversial business practices: The company is being sued in Baltimore for alleged mismanagement of apartment complexes there, and in New York for allegedly overcharging on rent. It’s also being investigated for its use of EB-5 visas after Jared’s sister touted his White House role in a pitch to Chinese investors.
Kushner is also under scrutiny in the Russia probe
The family business dealings aren’t the end of Jared’s woes: In special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference with the 2016 election, Kushner’s name just keeps coming up.
1) Jared attended the June Trump Tower meeting: Along with his brother-in-law Donald Trump Jr. and then-campaign chair Paul Manafort, Kushner attended an infamous meeting with a Russian lawyer and four other individuals with Russian ties on June 9, 2016. Emails reveal that Don Jr. set up this meeting with the understanding that he’d be getting dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government. He later forwarded the email thread stating this to Kushner.
All participants in the meeting, including Kushner, claim that nothing of significance ended up happening in it — that not only did no dirt change hands but there wasn’t even any useful dirt on offer in the first place. Kushner says he arrived late and left early — and that he in fact emailed his assistant during it: “Can u pls call me on my cell? Need excuse to get out of meeting.”
But Mueller’s investigators have been digging into events surrounding the meeting, and if there is more to the story of what happened that day, Kushner may well know it. (Also, Kushner later happened to be aboard Air Force One when now-President Trump got Don Jr. to release a very misleading statement about the meeting.)
2) Jared oversaw the Trump campaign’s digital operation: Mueller’s team is reportedly looking into whether anyone on Trump’s digital team collaborated with Russian cyber operatives and bots who targeted voters in key areas with propaganda. And it was Kushner who oversaw that digital operation (picking Brad Parscale to run it). However, Mueller’s indictment of several Russians in February did not allege that anyone in the Trump camp was knowingly involved in the Russian propaganda activity.
3) Jared met with the Russian ambassador and a Russian banker during the transition: On December 1, 2016, Kushner and National Security Adviser-designate Michael Flynn met with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak at Trump Tower — a meeting they didn’t disclose for months.
At the meeting, Kushner and Kislyak “discussed the possibility of setting up a secret and secure communications channel between Trump’s transition team and the Kremlin,” the Washington Post reported months later. This has raised questions about whether Kushner was seeking to shield his contacts with the Russian government from US intelligence. (For his part, Jared has said the meeting was uneventful and that the line of communication was intended to be about Syria.)
Later in the month, Kushner sent a deputy to attend another meeting with Kislyak. And after that, on December 13, Kushner met with Sergey Gorkov, head of Vnesheconombank (a Russian bank currently under US sanctions that has been involved in Kremlin espionage and promoting the Russian government’s interests abroad).
Neither party can agree on what the meeting was about — Kushner says he took the meeting for diplomatic reasons and they discussed world affairs, but not his family’s business interests. Gorkov’s representatives, however, said the meeting was about business. (After the meeting, Gorkov headed off to Japan, where he reportedly planned to meet with the visiting Vladimir Putin.)
4) Jared is mentioned in Michael Flynn’s plea agreement: At another point in the transition, Kushner instructed Flynn to call several foreign government officials, including Ambassador Kislyak, to ask them to try to block a pending United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel’s settlement policies. Flynn later lied to the FBI about these calls, as he admitted in his plea agreement with Mueller’s team.
5) Jared filed laughably incomplete disclosure forms of his foreign contacts: Since the election, Kushner has come under scrutiny for initially leaving these contacts he’d had with Russians, and contacts he’d had with other foreigners during the campaign, off his security clearance form. He’s said his assistant submitted the form prematurely and has had to repeatedly revise it.
6) Jared seemed to want Trump to fire James Comey: Top advisers in Trump’s early White House such as Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon reportedly urged the president not to take such a rash move as firing the FBI director. But Kushner wasn’t among them. At the very least, he was supportive of Comey’s firing, and by many accounts, he outright advocated for Trump to do it. This naturally raises questions of why he did so, and whether he feared he himself might have something to hide in the Russia probe.
7) There could be leverage on Jared that’s unrelated to Russia: Finally, Mueller’s interest in Kushner may even go beyond Russia. Last week, CNN reported that the special counsel’s investigators were looking into Kushner’s “efforts to secure financing for his company from foreign investors during the presidential transition” — including from non-Russian investors. (This could conceivably be used by Mueller as leverage to try to “flip” Jared, should he know any incriminating Russian interference-related information.)
For his part, Steve Bannon speculated at length to journalist Michael Wolff that Mueller could target Kushner Companies for potential money laundering. (Though it should be noted that Bannon is hardly an unbiased source here — he despises Kushner and views him as an enemy.)
“You realize where this is going,” Bannon continued. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose [Andrew] Weissmann first and he is a money laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner... It’s as plain as a hair on your face... It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They’re going to go right through that.”
...”Charlie Kushner,” said Bannon, smacking his head again in additional disbelief. “He’s going crazy because they’re going to get down deep in his shit about how he’s financed everything... The rabbis with the diamonds and all the shit coming out of Israel ... and all these guys coming out of Eastern Europe ... all these Russian guys ... and guys in Kazakhstan. ... And he’s frozen on 666 [Fifth Avenue], when it goes under next year, the whole thing’s cross-collateralized ... he’s wiped, he’s gone, he’s done, it’s over ... Toast.”
But Kushner Companies sent a statement to the Real Deal in January that reads: “The Office of Special Counsel has not contacted us. There is no money laundering. There is no Russian connection. There are no improper loans. There are no misrepresentations. Everything has been handled in a normal, professional and commercial manner.”
The FBI hasn’t given Jared a top-secret clearance, and we don’t know why
As if all this weren’t enough, in recent weeks, the long-simmering problem of Jared’s security clearance has finally boiled over.
Kushner has been in the White House since Trump’s first day and been privy to all sorts of top-secret information. But he did it all with a mere “interim” security clearance — because, for reasons that aren’t yet public, the FBI has been reluctant to approve him for a full “top secret” clearance. (New appointees often do their work with an interim clearance for a time while the FBI checks into their background — but this generally doesn’t take 13 months, especially if an appointee holds a role as high-level and important as Kushner’s.)
Kushner’s clearance woes were the subject of occasional discussion but didn’t dominate the news cycle. That changed when news broke last month that White House staff secretary Rob Porter had a history of spousal abuse allegations against him — and that he was also doing his job with an interim clearance. The Porter scandal led to increased scrutiny of the Trump White House’s handling of the clearance process (which, it seemed, top aides had previously looked the other way about in part because Jared was one person affected).
The reason for the holdup is not yet known. It could involve his business — the New Yorker’s Adam Entous and Evan Osnos reported that US intelligence officials got information that Kushner had discussed his business interests with the Chinese ambassador in early 2017. And a recent Washington Post report revealed that Kushner had caused consternation by contacting foreign officials and not informing the National Security Council — and that foreign officials had discussed trying to gain influence over him through his business.
It could also involve the Russia investigation. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees Mueller’s probe, personally informed the White House last month that “significant information” meant Kushner’s clearance couldn’t yet be approved. (He reportedly didn’t specify what the information was.) And Michael Flynn and Rick Gates, both of whom worked closely with Kushner, are now cooperating with Mueller.
Where does all this leave the son-in-law in chief?
Whatever’s going on, Chief of Staff John Kelly has imposed new rules that White House staffers still waiting for a full clearance could no longer handle top-secret information. Those rules went into effect last Friday, so Kushner lost his “top secret” privileges. The Trump family is reportedly unhappy with Kelly’s move, but the president didn’t intervene to stop him.
And now the knives are out for Kushner. The Post story on his foreign contacts and the Times story on the loans he got from companies after meeting with their executive in the White House both leaked in recent days. A source described Kushner’s “demeanor in recent days as paranoid” to CNN. But as Maggie Haberman of the Times alluded on Twitter, it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.