Jared Kushner
Jared Corey Kushner (born January 10, 1981) is an American businessman, investor, and former government official.[4] He is the son-in-law of former president Donald Trump through his marriage to Ivanka Trump, and served as a senior advisor to Trump from 2017 to 2021.[5] He was also Director of the Office of American Innovation.
Jared Kushner
Position established
Position abolished
Republican (2018–present)
Democratic (1999–2009)
Independent (2009–2018)
3
- Charles Kushner (father)
- Kushner family
- Trump family (by marriage)
- Businessman
- investor
For much of his career, Kushner worked as a real-estate investor in New York City, especially through the family business Kushner Companies. He took over the company after his father Charles Kushner was convicted for 18 criminal charges, including illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering in 2005, although Charles was controversially pardoned by Trump in 2020. Jared met Ivanka Trump around 2005, and the couple married in 2009. He also became involved in the newspaper industry after purchasing The New York Observer in 2006. He was registered as a Democrat and donated to Democratic politicians for much of his life, but registered as Independent in 2009 and eventually as Republican in 2018. He played a significant role in the Donald Trump 2016 presidential campaign, and was at one point seen as its de facto campaign manager. Around Trump's election, Kushner was frequently accused of conflicts of interest, profiting from policy proposals for which he personally advocated within the Trump administration.
He became Senior Advisor to President Trump in 2017, and held the position until Trump left office in 2021. His appointment was followed by concerns of nepotism. Here, he led the administration's effort to pass the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform bill signed into law in 2018. Kushner was the primary Trump administration participant for the Middle East Peace Process, authoring the Trump peace plan[6] and facilitating the talks that led to the signing of the Abraham Accords and other normalization agreements between Israel and various Arab states in 2020.[7] Kushner also played an influential role in the Trump administration's COVID-19 response. Despite initially advising Trump that the media was exaggerating the threat of the disease, he eventually became a leader in the federal effort to procure medical supplies and develop a vaccine as a founding board member on Operation Warp Speed.[8] He was a leading broker in the US–Mexico–Canada agreement,[9] for which he was awarded honors by the Mexican government.
Since leaving the White House, Kushner founded Affinity Partners, a private equity firm that derives most of its funds from Saudi government's sovereign wealth fund.[10][11][12]
Early life and education
Jared Corey Kushner was born on January 10, 1981, in Livingston, New Jersey, to Seryl Kushner (née Stadtmauer) and Charles Kushner, a real-estate developer and convicted felon. His father was friends with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and attended several dinners with them. Morris Stadtmauer was Jared's maternal grandfather.[13] His paternal grandparents, Reichel and Joseph Kushner, were Holocaust survivors who came to the U.S. in 1949 from Navahrudak, now in Belarus.[14][15] Reichel, described as the family's matriarch, led efforts during the Holocaust to escape from the Navahrudak ghetto by digging a tunnel. Later, she became a member of the Bielski partisans.[16][17]
Raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family,[18] Kushner graduated from the Frisch School, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school, in 1999 and enrolled at Harvard University in the same year. According to journalist Daniel Golden, Kushner's father made a donation of $2.5 million to the university in 1998, not long before Jared was admitted.[19][20] At Harvard, Kushner was elected into the Fly Club, supported the campus Chabad house led by Hirschy Zarchi,[21][22] and bought and sold real estate in Somerville, Massachusetts, as a vice president of Somerville Building Associates (a division of Kushner Companies), returning a profit of $20 million by its dissolution in 2005.[23][24][25] Kushner graduated from Harvard with honors in 2003, with a BA degree in government.[26][27]
Kushner then enrolled in the JD/MBA dual degree program at New York University School of Law and New York University Stern School of Business, and graduated with both degrees in 2007. He interned at Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office, and with the New York law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.[28]
Politics
Political background
Jared Kushner had been a lifelong Democrat prior to his father-in-law Donald Trump entering politics.[68] He had donated over $10,000 to Democratic campaigns[69] starting at the age of 11. In 2008, he donated to the campaign for Hillary Clinton and his newspaper the New York Observer endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain in the 2008 United States presidential election.[70] After expressing disappointment with Obama, however, he registered as an independent in 2009 and endorsed Republican U.S. presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 via the New York Observer.[71] In 2014 he continued to donate to Democratic groups,[70] but joined his father-in-law Donald Trump's nascent US presidential campaign in the field of the Republican candidates in 2015.[76] Kushner had no prior involvement in campaign politics or in government before Trump's campaign.[77]
Career after Trump Administration
Saudi Arabia investment fund
Kushner's firm landed the more than $2 billion only six months after Kushner stopped working as a senior adviser for the president,[228] to invest in American and Israeli companies expanding in India, Africa, the Middle East and other parts of Asia. Investors include $2 billion from the Saudi public investment fund, with Kushner stating that he hopes to open an "investment corridor between Saudi Arabia and Israel",[11][12] seen internationally as a "sign of warming ties between two historic rivals".[229]
Within the Trump administration, Kushner had been a staunch defender of Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman.[10] In 2021, Kushner started an investment firm, Affinity Partners. He sought funds for the new company through the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf countries.[230][231] Advisers for the Public Investment Fund, the Saudi government's sovereign wealth fund, expressed several concerns about the transaction—including the inexperience of Affinity management, the degree of risk to be assumed by the Saudi kingdom, an "excessive" management fee, and a finding that Affinity's operations were "unsatisfactory in all aspects". However, PIF management overruled them and invested $2 billion in Kushner's firm, only six months after Kushner had left the White House.[10] The firm primarily depended on Saudi money, as, by April 2022, it only had $2.5 billion under its management.[10] According to ethics experts, the investment created the appearance of potential payback for Kushner.[10] The House Oversight Committee said on June 2, 2022, that it had opened an investigation into whether Kushner had traded on his government position to get the deal.[232]
The fund plans to invest Saudi money into startup companies in Israel. According to the Wall Street Journal, "The decision marks the first known instance that the Saudi Public Investment Fund’s cash will be directed to Israel, a sign of the kingdom’s increasing willingness to do business with the country, even though they have no diplomatic relations."[233]
In 2023, Republican candidate for President Chris Christie criticized Kushner and Trump for the deal, saying "Why would you send Jared Kushner to the Middle East when you have Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo... You send him? Why? We found out the answer six months after he left office: $2 billion from the Saudis to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, $2 billion, and because he did all this and more with his family. I'm going to end this family grift that's going on. We are not a third-world republic."[234] The Wall Street Journal reported that Kushner has not made any investments despite receiving the funding some years ago, collecting "tens of millions in management fees each year" while not making any investments. Norm Eisen of the Brookings Institution suggested the payments were meant to curry favor with Trump's family, should the former president retake the White House in the 2024 election: "It appears to be money for nothing."[235] The House Oversight Committee Chairman, Kentucky Republican James Comer, said he believes Kushner “crossed the line of ethics” by accepting the investment from Saudi Arabia.[236]
Political memoir: Breaking History
Kushner wrote a memoir, Breaking History: A White House Memoir, that was published in August 2022.[226]
Controversies
Allegations of nepotism
Kushner's appointment as Trump's senior advisor in the White House in January 2017 was questioned on the basis of a 1967 anti-nepotism law which forbids public officials from hiring family members, and explicitly one's son-in-law, in agencies or offices they oversee.[237] The law was passed in response to President John F. Kennedy's decision to appoint his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, as attorney general in 1961.[238] However, on January 20, 2017, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating the anti-nepotism law does not apply to appointments within the White House,[239][240] after Kushner's lawyer, Jamie Gorelick claimed the 1967 law does not apply to the White House because it is not an 'agency'.[241] Among other precedents, the OLC opinion invoked a 1993 D.C. Circuit Court ruling that enabled Hillary Clinton to serve within the White House during the Clinton administration.[242] Kushner was sworn in on January 22, 2017[243] and was given the office which is physically the closest to the Oval Office.[244]
Personal life
Kushner has a younger brother, Joshua, and two sisters, Dara and Nicole.[274] He married Ivanka Trump in a Jewish ceremony on October 25, 2009. They had met in 2005 through mutual friends.[275][276][277] Kushner and his wife Ivanka (who converted to Judaism in 2009[278]) are Modern Orthodox Jews, keep a kosher home, and observe the Jewish Shabbat.[279][280][281] They have three children, a daughter born in July 2011[282] and two sons, born in October 2013[283] and March 2016.[284]
In 2004, Kushner's father pleaded guilty to eighteen felony counts of tax fraud, election violations, and witness tampering.[285] (He retaliated against his own sister who was a cooperating witness in the case.)[29] The case against Charles Kushner was prosecuted by Chris Christie, who later became Governor of New Jersey and, for a period was part of Donald Trump's election campaign team in 2016.[285] Christie subsequently claimed that Jared Kushner was responsible for having him fired as revenge for sending his father to prison.[286][287]
In 2017, federal disclosures suggested Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump had assets worth at least $240 million, and as much as $740 million.[106][288] They also have an art collection, estimated to be worth millions, that was not mentioned in the financial disclosures initially.[289] The United States Office of Government Ethics has said that the updated disclosures comply with the regulations and laws.[290]
Kushner was diagnosed with thyroid cancer in October 2019 and underwent treatment for it during the Trump Administration, he recounts in his political memoir.[291] In August 2022 he underwent a second thyroid surgery.[292]
Kushner appeared in the 2022 documentary Unprecedented.[293]
Domestic honors