Jared Kushner have cashed in on his time in the White House by receiving a two-billion-dollar investment from Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, MSNBC's investigative journalist Vicky Ward revealed.
There have since been calls from watchdog groups and top Democrats for a criminal investigation.
Revelations about the sordid deal made headlines last week in The New York Times and other major news outlets around the world, and this week the media and top Democrats are calling for investigations.
“If people actually cared about corruption by the president’s family members, Saudi Arabia giving Jared Kushner $2 billion would be the biggest story in America right now,” declared the watchdog group Citizens for Ethics & Responsibility in Washington on Monday. Former US secretary of labor Robert Reich noted how Kushner “cashes in” on his connection with Trump. Journalist and MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said the $2 billion “investment” by the Saudi’s in Kushner’s latest scheme represents “a huge story of both corruption and human rights abuses.”
The newly revealed multibillion deal between Saudi Arabia and Donald Trump’s son-in-law and former senior adviser, Jared Kushner, shows that the scale of apparent corruption and brazen misuse of power during the Trump White House was even more audacious than we previously thought.
Senator Elizabeth Warren called on the US Department of Justice to “take a hard look” at whether laws were violated when Jared Kushner collected $2 billion from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
According to The New York Times, a Saudi sovereign wealth fund led by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, often referred to as MBS, invested $2 billion in Kushner’s fledgling private equity firm six months after Trump left office. And it’s blisteringly clear from the details that while MBS’s expenditure did not make financial sense, it made political sense as payback for favorable treatment.
The episode vividly illustrates how the Trump era was marked by particularly naked forms of self-enriching power plays, signaling to the world that American diplomacy was on sale to the highest bidder. And it sets a shameful precedent that our government has inadequate safeguards to protect against in the future.
The newly reported deal looks quite a lot like MBS wanted to return the favor for all the political back-scratching.
During the Trump administration, Kushner played Trump’s point man on Middle East policy and diplomacy and developed an unusually close relationship with MBS. Among other things, Kushner and MBS reportedly stayed up late together several nights planning strategy on an unexpected trip in 2017 that surprised intelligence officials. Kushner also sought to inflate sales figures of a U.S. arms deal to Saudi Arabia to symbolically bring the countries closer together. MBS reportedly bragged to the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates that Kushner was “in his pocket.” (MBS denied this.)
One of Kushner’s most notable contributions to Trump’s agenda on Saudi Arabia was shielding MBS’s reputation after the firestorm of controversy tied to the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. After U.S. intelligence reports indicated that MBS ordered the operation to assassinate Khashoggi (which MBS denied), the U.S.’s relationship with Saudi Arabia came under fire from both parties. But Kushner defended Saudi Arabia and arms deals with the Gulf country after the ordeal.
The newly reported deal looks quite a lot like MBS wanted to return the favor for all the political backscratching. Here’s what makes it feel so obvious: It’s a bad deal for MBS financially. Kushner is inexperienced in private equity (and had a middling record in real estate), and the seriousness of his new outfit was questionable. So questionable, in fact, that when MBS’s vetted the funds tied to Kushner’s firm, a screening panel expressed concerns about the wisdom of such an investment after finding a bunch of major problems.
