And The Other Crooked Trump Spawn?
When Jared Kushner was flunking out of high school, his family hired a friend of mine to tutor him. Later, when his father bought him a place at Harvard, my friend didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Yesterday, Alan Steinberg— a Republican who worked both for George W. Bush and Christie Whitman— penned an OpEd about Kushner’s corruption for the Newark Star-Ledger, a followup to his 2020 piece How this child from New Jersey has morphed into the Trump Family’s Rasputin. He noted in that piece that Kushner went to the Jewish Day School in Paramus, the Frisch School and “was admitted without merit to Harvard, failed at real estate, and how his incompetence was then foisted upon America from the White House. His management of Kushner Cos.’ residential rental real estate properties in Baltimore from 2013 to 2017 prior to his entering the Trump administration had already earned him a well-deserved reputation as a deplorable Baltimore slum landlord. Among the violations reported were code violations, mouse infestation, mold problems and maggots. [Different is some ways from MAGAts.]
As noted by the conservative intellectual Max Boot, Jared arrived at the White House with no obvious qualifications and so many conflicts of interest that he did not qualify for a security clearance until Trump overrode the concerns of career professionals. Jared’s gross incompetence would have been laughable had it not endangered the health, safety, and constitutional foundation of American governance during the national COVID lockdown.
When the Trump administration ended, I was relieved for many reasons, among the most prominent being the elimination of the national danger of Jared/Ivanka incompetence and amorality. My sense of divine deliverance from the national Jared/Ivanka nightmare was heightened by the Politico article, “How Jared and Ivanka Hijacked the White House’s COVID Response,” by former Trump White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham.
As Grisham put it, the unelected Jared and Ivanka thought of themselves as the “shadow president and First Lady.” She described how Jared had a habit of taking over policies he knew nothing about— and then, when things went wrong, he and Ivanka would disappear on vacation. “He would dive into these areas where I know he had absolutely no expertise and claim to save the day, and then he would leave.”
What I could not have foreseen is that after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner would write his own new chapter in the annals of New Jersey corruption. His misfeasance and malfeasance consist of acts of gross appearance of impropriety and amorality, rather than criminality itself. Most significant in this regard was the benefit Jared received just six months after leaving the White House due to his support while in government for the Nazi-like Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler.
Ethicists universally agree that the appearance of impropriety by a government official or by a private individual dealing with government is as much a breach of ethics as impropriety itself. It must be said that not only Jared Kushner but also his father, Charles displayed total contempt for this principle of ethical behavior. When it comes to insouciance about the appearance of impropriety, Jared Kushner has had the ultimate model in his father, Charles.
Charles Kushner pleaded guilty in 2004 to a host of federal charges, including witness tampering and tax evasion. In one of the more salacious aspects of the case, Kushner hired a sex worker to lure his brother-in-law and then sent a video of their encounter to his sister. Prior to leaving office, Trump gave Charles Kushner a full pardon. Subsequently, Charles gave Trump’s leading SuperPAC, Make America Great Again, Inc., a donation of $1 million.
The appearance of impropriety by Father Kushner regarding his pardon and his Trump SuperPAC donation was highly offensive. Still, it had all the significance of a traffic ticket offense as compared with Jared’s $2 billion blood money benefit from MBS.
U.S. intelligence agencies concluded that MBS had approved the 2018 killing of Jamal Khassoggi by strangling and dismemberment with a bone saw. Khashoggi, a columnist for the Washington Post and a resident of Virginia, had criticized the kingdom’s rulers. Still, according to the New York Times, a source close to the White House confirmed that Jared Kushner urged President Trump to stand by MBS.
In a blatant display of unconscionable cynicism, Kushner argued that the crown prince could survive the outrage just as he has weathered past criticism. Jared’s role as an apologist for MBS and his uncivilized murderous regime was tantamount to the role his fellow New Jerseyan, Charles Lindbergh played in acting as a defender of Hitler and the Nazis before World War 2.
After leaving the White House, in his book, Breaking History: A White House Memoir, Jared defended his loyalty to MBS, in spite of the bloodthirsty nature of his murder of Khashoggi, with the following argument, defying all norms of decency and morality:
While this situation was terrible, I could not ignore the fact that the reforms that MBS was implementing were having a positive impact on millions of people in the kingdom— especially women.
This resembles the argument that Hitler’s defenders gave in the 1930s on his behalf: that his hatred of Jews could be ignored since he was doing so much good for the German economy.
Six months after leaving the White House, Jared Kushner secured a $2 billion investment from the Saudi Arabian sovereign fund, the Public Investment Fund (PIF), led by MBS. This investment was made despite objections from the PIF investment advisers about the merits of the deal.
Among these objections were: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to Trump, according to minutes of the panel’s meeting last June 30.
In view of the serious doubts raised about the economics and security of the PIF investment in Affinity Partners, the transaction has all the appearance of a massive payback from MBS to Jared for interceding on his behalf. Jared’s grotesque and amoral appearance of post-White House impropriety was virtually unsurpassed in the history of the presidency.
Even Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY) said that Jared Kushner, “crossed the line of ethics” by accepting a $2 billion investment from the Saudi government in his private investment firm six months after he left the White House." [Comer walked that back.]
Yet the Jared/Ivanka danger to America’s well-being, ethics, and morality may return to the White House if Donald Trump is elected to the presidency in 2024.
…In an opinion piece entitled “Jared and Ivanka are slinking back to Gomorrah,” Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker noted that for a while after the 2020 election defeat, in their normal insidious fashion, Jared and Ivanka distanced themselves from The Donald. Once Trump began to climb in the polls, however, Jared and Ivanka again began attending Trump family gatherings and walking in on Trump meetings.
…If Donald Trump is elected President in 2024, we can expect once again Jared and Ivanka to take up residence in the White House. The stench of Jared Kushner corruption will once again hover over our nation’s capitol.
God bless America. God save America.