Many observers of the highly dysfunctional President Donald J Trump administration have noted how a major contributing factor for the foreign policy disasters might well derive from the appointment of two real estate billionaires personally linked to the president as its top negotiators. That Steve Witkoff and son-in-law Jared Kushner had no diplomatic experience right from the beginning the presumption should have been a given that they would be managed and consistently out-maneuvered by their counterparts from other countries. That Kushner possessed unique access to Trump and might be inclined to give him bad advice in return for business “favors” also should have been reckoned by Congress and the national media.

In fact, there have been a lot of good reasons to be most particularly suspicious of son-in-law Jared Kushner given his history of shady business dealings. Indeed, any concerns have proven to be valid with one only needing to cite the complete failure of the two presidential special emissaries judging by their involvement in the so-called peace negotiations relating to the conflicts in Russia-Ukraine and in the Middle East. In both cases, the situation seen from a perspective of US actual interests, has deteriorated in spite of clear evidence that other parties to the negotiations were seeking a solution.

Kushner, an unashamed Israel Firster, like his partner in crime Witkoff, did everything he could to protect war criminal Israel and those Arab states considered to be friends and was ineffective in dealing with the Russians, who rightly do not trust him. Kushner’s family is meanwhile extremely close to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who used to stay at the Kushner family home in New Jersey some years ago when he was in the US. The Kushner family foundation has also been funding Israeli settlements on the Palestinian West Bank, which is illegal, all of which makes Jared a ridiculous choice as US designated negotiator.

Kushner is, of course, married to Donald Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who converted to Judaism which is how he was able to step up into his White House designated position. He also was and is a business partner of the president and his family. Reckoned altogether, it has meant that Jared Kushner has been able to exploit his status with the White House to take steps to enrich the Trump family as well as himself and his own family through both connivance and manipulation of his interlocutors in the foreign policy world, most particularly in the Gulf States.

To cite only one example of how politics, Israeli interests and the profit motive all come together one only has to review Kushner’s glowing account of the splendor of a future redeveloped Riviera style resort, quite likely to be named after Trump and featuring a gilded statue of the president, constructed on the rubble remains of old Gaza that will cover or otherwise dispose of tens of thousands of Palestinian bodies. It is a developer’s dream that is too disgusting to contemplate and is the mark of the man, unfortunately. Kushner’s participation in Trump’s phony Board of Peace has been little more than a cover story giving Netanyahu license to kill coming from America’s president, a man also owned by Israel, who believes that the only real thing that matters is ignoring his responsibilities as president and manipulating his position to make money, lots of it!

Jared Kushner has apparently inherited genes that make him acquisitive beyond all reason. His father Charles is currently serving as Trump appointee US Ambassador in France, where he speaks no French and is constantly complaining about antisemitism in the country. He was previously convicted and served nearly two years in prison more than a decade ago in a felony tax fraud case that grew into a bizarre tale involving sex tapes including the hiring of a prostitute. Kushner had hired the woman to seduce his brother-in-law who was testifying against him over the fraud charges, arranging to record a sexual encounter between the two and send the tape to his sister to force the relative to back off. Charles subsequently received a full pardon from Trump after contributing heavily to the Trump presidential campaign and was subsequently given the ambassadorial post.

Real estate mogul Jared followed in his father’s footsteps to include possible involvement in the aftermath of the 2018 murder and dismemberment of US resident Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul by Saudi agents when he reportedly became the White House’s most ardent defender of the Saudi monarchy in exchange for an offshore substantial dollar bank account arranged by Riyadh. As a result the murder of an American resident by the Saudis was never seriously challenged.

And Jared has also been in the news lately over a not-altogether-legal scheme involving the Rothschild banking dynasty that was coordinated with corrupt local officials to acquire an island offshore of Albania to develop into an Adriatic Sea luxury resort. Local people were revolted by the development itself and the corruption involved and turned out in their tens of thousands to protest, forcing the government to back down on the deal.

Corruption might be Jared’s middle name! Beyond the development projects erected over both environment devastation and a mountain of dead bodies, the tragedy of Jared Kushner is his destruction of his slice of US foreign policy out of deference to Trump and his own family interests, which also meant making billions of sometimes insider trading generated dollars as part of the process. A new book by Matthew Cole on his perfidy has just appeared entitled “Princes and Thieves.” There have also number of articles on it and related issues, one of which by Charles P Pierce in Esquire magazine bore the possibly appropriate title “Jared Kushner Is the Worst Thing to Ever Happen to This Country, Maybe the World” subtitled “A new book reveals the extent of his shady dealings in the Middle East.”

The book makes the claim that Jared Kushner conducted something like diplomacy for profit without regard for actual American interests, behavior that might be regarded as treasonous by many. Also considering that Jared was privy to intelligence secrets through his White House access, one might reasonably argue that he shared such information with his “investors” from the Persian Gulf and Israel, meaning that he was engaged in espionage. A major revelation is how he and several United Arab Emirate leaders conspired during Trump’s first term in office to establish a $2 billion in slush funds as part of a plan to influence US foreign policy in the region.

Kushner’s ties to Gulf money have also drawn scrutiny more recently. After leaving the White House in 2020, his private equity firm, Affinity Partners, received a $2 billion investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, a deal that has drawn scrutiny from ethics watchdogs. Affinity has also invested in an Israeli weapons manufacturer, making one question his sincerity in “negotiating” to bring a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

Jared Kushner certainly knew then and knows now that any efforts made by him to shape US policy that came from a foreign government that had provided him with money would make him an agent of a foreign power and require his registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938. The act requires citizens who lobby in that fashion to declare themselves and the country they are working for to the Justice Department.

Once registered, the individual or group would be required to observe complete transparency over the sources of its income and it political contacts with foreign officials. It is presumed that Kushner might be investigated and charged by the new Congress that will be installed as a consequence of the recent election regarding any number of crimes but even if it does happen in the next two years he will likely be pardoned by Trump.

What does Jared Kushner have to say about his behavior? Inevitably, he has denied the claims made in the Cole book, though he has refused to be interviewed on the subject. His lawyer has promised lawsuits however and has already filed one against Vanity Fair, which published an article by Cole on the subject. The book’s claims are in fact supported by descriptions of the access of Cole’s often anonymous sources in his notes, citing, for example, “a confidential source with direct knowledge” and “author interview with source who attended the meeting.”

What is already known confirms that Kushner’s key relationship initially, beyond that with Israel, was with the UAE’s president, Mohammed bin Zayed (widely known as MBZ). It developed after the first election of Donald Trump in 2016, with Kushner being identified as the key player supported by the substantial secret bank account to be able to influence the new president on Middle Eastern policy. Per Cole, four senior officials from Trump’s first term, including two national security advisers, stated to him that they knew of no presidential approval for Kushner to have access to any foreign government’s bank accounts which means the UAE relationship was secret right from the beginning.

A highly respectable source that has been plausibly identified by Pierce in his article relating to the Kushner-UAE relationship is, perhaps surprisingly, Dutch government intelligence. “Sometime in late 2017, the Netherlands Defense Intelligence and Security Service (MIVD) made a startling discovery: A General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation (GRU) operative, a dark web hacker specializing in stolen bank data, was traveling to the UK for an espionage mission. When the Russian national arrived in England, the Dutch informed him that he had two options: he could work for them against the GRU, or the British would arrest him. Once in UK government custody, the operative would be charged with espionage. If convicted, he would spend years in a British prison.

The Russian chose to change his employer. Later that year, the Russian operative gave the Dutch spies access to one of the GRU’s most sensitive assets. Located in Rostov, Russia, the GRU’s hacking and cyber team operated a remote server on which they stored some of their bounty. During their search through these secret files, the Dutch found something astonishing: screenshots of Jared Kushner’s iPhone. As they monitored Kushner’s phone, they discovered he used it to log in to a UAE bank account. By the time the Dutch spies had visibility into the phone, the account had received hundreds of millions of dollars from a bank in Azerbaijan. Their initial assessment was that the bank account was affiliated with the government there.”

The connivance between MBZ and Kushner in what was to follow, whatever its provenance, would represent what must surely be the worst case ever of US foreign policy being managed clandestinely without any regard for the Constitution, the established federal government bureaucracy, nor both the president and Secretary of State, neither of whom were aware of the relationship.

In this case, Cole demonstrates how Kushner worked with the UAE to determine US policy across the Middle East and, in return, he was given full access to “slush fund” bank accounts set up for that purpose. Beyond the UAE, it is believed that Kushner used the money to cultivate relationships and come to secret agreements with Israel, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Some of the money was apparently also used to establish friendly regimes in Egypt, Yemen, Qatar and Libya. One major objective was to support the rise of Mohammed bin Salman as crown prince of Saudi Arabia and, ultimately, the normalization of relations between Israel and many of the Muslim powers, the so-called Abraham Accords.

As it turned out, the UAE’s expectations were borne out by what followed. Trump did indeed make Kushner his senior adviser with a broadly conceived brief that included the pursuit of a final settlement in the Middle East that would benefit both Israel and the UAE. 

[…]

Via https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/jared-kushners-diplomacy-for-hire/