Jared Kushner’s Company Curiously Raked in $90 Million Since He Joined the White House
Jared Kushner has been a White House adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, for more than two years now. In that time, he's become BFF with the Saudi crown prince accused of ordering the murder of a Washington Post journalist and had a brain meltdown on national TV when he was asked if the president has ever done anything racist. He's also had some questionable financial growth. One of his companies has been flooded with tens of millions of dollars in anonymous foreign funding, according to a new report from The Guardian.
The real estate company Cadre, owned by Kushner, his brother, Joshua, and a friend, has taken in $90 million in investments from Saudi Arabia and a "Goldman Sachs entity" in the Cayman Islands. Cadre is also one of the properties that Kushner initially forgot to put on his security-clearance application when he joined the Trump administration. Kushner co-founded Cadre in 2014, and despite slow growth in its first couple years, its value has quintupled since 2017, when Kushner joined the White House. The company allows investors to pool money together to buy real estate, and it now manages about $522 million to buy properties across the U.S.
Like his father-in-law, Kushner has refused to completely divest from his business interests while he's working for the federal government. When he joined the White House, Kushner resigned from the board and reduced his stake to 25 percent. That's still a substantial chunk, though. "The problem with Kushner—and with Trump—is that we have all these corporate entities, and often nobody knows who is invested in them and where those investors borrowed their money. We simply have no idea," Richard Painter, a former Bush administration ethics lawyer, told The Guardian.
All of this should raise red flags about Kushner's ability to be an honest broker, especially since Trump has him working on foreign policy in the Middle East. And it's also shady domestically. Since joining the White House, Kushner has claimed that he's completely removed from any decisions on real estate policy, which would be an extremely obvious conflict of interest for the fledgling real estate tycoon. But his wife hasn't. Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter and White House adviser, helped push for the creation of "opportunity zones" to entice investors to sink money into underdeveloped areas. It's basically an elaborate scheme to let rich investors and companies like Cadre avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes.
In a normal presidential administration, one that was remotely interested in not appearing corrupt, this would probably be a scandal. But Trump himself is still directly profiting off of being the president, and in almost comically obvious ways. According to a recent story from The Washington Post, an Iraqi sheikh named Nahro al-Kasnazan spent 26 nights in Trump's D.C. hotel while encouraging National Security Adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to get more aggressive with Iran. The hotel stay cost tens of thousands of dollars. Al-Kasnazan insisted the stay was a coincidence, telling the Post: "We just heard about this new Trump hotel in Washington, D.C., and thought it would be a good place to stay."
If there's any consolation here, it's that all the parties are as bumbling as they are corrupt. The idea that Kushner is keeping his financial interests out of his White House work is as believable as foreign delegations booking a stay at the Trump International Hotel for the Ivanka Trump spa.
Originally Appeared on GQ
