Just How Corrupt Is Jared Kushner? A New Deal With the Saudis Tells Us

Photo by Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post / Getty Images

Jared Kushner made it no secret during his time in the White House that he intended to form an alliance with the Saudi government. His cynical friendship with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country and authorizer of the killing of The Washington Post’s Jamal Khashoggi, gave Kushner access to all manner of deals and favors. The latest deal, reported by The New York Times, will net Kushner’s new Affinity Fund $2 billion dollars in investment from the Saudi Public Investment Fund led by bin Salman, even after the group’s own investment advisors objected to the investment based on the “inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”—meaning, of course, Kushner, who has little to no experience in private equity investment.

The deal will mean the Saudis will comprise 80 percent of the current international investment in Kushner’s Affinity Fund which to date has raised a total of $2.5 billion. Because Affinity Fund will charge a 1.5 percent annual management fee to the investors, this will net Kushner some $25 million in payments annually. The Saudi fund advisors who raised objections to the investment cited the management fee specifically, saying it “seems excessive.” Indeed, the fee is objectively high for a new and inexperienced fund manager. A similar investment by the Saudis in former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s fund only pays a one percent fee, and Mnuchin has decades of experience in the area of private equity and finance. 

While there are no laws prohibiting government officials from taking such large sums of investments from foreign investors once they leave office, the circumstances around this raise serious concerns. Was the huge sum, for example, simply a quid pro quo for Kushner, who was the leading defender of the crown prince within the White House over the Khashoggi murder? Did Kushner do bin Salmon’s bidding in brokering better relations in the Persian Gulf between Israel and its Arab neighbors, something for which bin Salmon had pressed, in order to curry favor? And were Kushner’s efforts to secure a $110 billion weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, even while it conducted a deadly war against Yemen leading to mass starvation, influenced in any way by the prospect of a future Saudi investment?

These are questions that cannot easily be answered without evidence of their communications, but they go to the heart of a deep ethical problem and structural flaw in our system. It is the very possibility of undue influence and corruption that needs to be mitigated, possibly through the passage of stricter limits on foreign-based investments into the projects of former government officials. The malodorous appearance of impropriety undermines the confidence of the public that government policies are being enacted for the sake of the public and national good, rather than to line the pockets of men like Jared Kushner or Steve Mnuchin.

And in Kushner’s case, it raises another troubling possibility: While he may currently be a former White House aide, he is still the son-in-law of the man who is likely to seek and win the GOP nomination for president in 2024. The Saudi investment in Affinity Fund could therefore also be seen as an investment into the possibility of future access and ties to a second Trump White House. Two billion dollars to the Saudis would seem a small price to pay to have the ear and the friendship of Jared Kushner in such a situation. 

One more thing: For all the time and attention right-wing news media has given toward amplifying any possible Hunter Biden story, these outlets have been tellingly silent about the more obvious and damning conflicts of interest perpetrated daily by Jared Kushner. It’s hard not to conclude that the Hunter Biden story serves to distract and create false equivalencies about White House nepotism in order to mask and to minimize, perhaps ultimately through public fatigue, the massive corruption that is plainly before us now.