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- [00:00]
A
Hey, guys, it's Andrew Egger with the Bulwark. One of the weird things about life under Trump 2.0, there's so much that's happening all the time right out in public that you have to figure out that you have to pay attention to chew over without really anybody trying to hide it. It can make it harder to pay attention to some of the quieter stories, some of the stuff that's taking place a little bit behind closed doors that requires a little bit of digging to really get into and get after. And I'm very pleased to be joined today to talk about one of those stories, which with Casey Michelle, who is author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, How America's Wealthiest Ally With Dictators Weaken the US And Destroy Democracy. We're going to be talking about America's favorite presidential fail son, son in law. Fail son in law. You could say Jared Kushner, who has been doing real well for himself, as it turns out. Casey, thanks for coming on to talk about this today.
- [00:50]
B
Andrew, thanks so much for, for having me. It's an honor to join you.
- [00:53]
A
Oh, well, so you have a new piece up today in Mother Jones. Great piece. Everybody should go read it. We'll put the link down below. It's a selection from this book, basically all about Jared, what Jared's been up to. To my shame, I will admit, I'd lost a little bit of sight of Jared. There are a lot of these guys to keep tabs on. I knew he was doing the diplomacy abroad. I knew he was involved in a lot of this stuff. But when I think like Trump family corruption, usually the people who spring to mind for me are Don and Eric, who are, you know, much more entangled with Trump's own personal sort of self enrichment schemes, all of the stuff that's running through the Trump Organization and all of that. But I learned a lot from this, this piece. Today. We talk a lot about how much more blatant and open a lot of this corruption has been under Trump 2.0. But, but it really did strike me, just reading through what you've written, just how entangled Jared Kushner's business interests have been with the diplomatic moonlighting he's been doing under his father in law, the president, Even since Trump 1.0, since 20. Really? Can you just kind of give us the quick readout of what Jared was up to during the first Trump term?
- [01:57]
B
Yeah. So it's funny to think back to the first Trump term and think about just how relatively straightforward, I suppose some of the corruption was then, or at least how much it appears like, like it was child's play back then compared to what it is now. But again, the beauty of writing a piece like this, and of course the beauty of writing a book like this is it gives me the opportunity to really go back and revisit some of what we thought at the time were these earth shattering and era defining scandals, which now, of course, appear microscopic compared to what we're dealing with right now. But Jared Kushner began so many of these networks, so many of these relationships, and so many of these, of course, patterns of what certainly appear to be corruption or at the very baseline conflict of interest, not during Trump's second term, not over the last year and a half, but going all the way back to Trump's first term. And frankly, many of these have been going on for a decade now. If we can go back to 2016, 2017 again, you'll see in the piece and you'll see in the book, if you get a chance to pre order it, that Jared Kushner was right there from the very beginning of Trump's presidency. Donald Trump's go to diplomat, go to point person for many different things around the world, but most especially Middle east policy under Donald Trump. And of course, Jared Kushner himself has no diplomatic history, he has no regional expertise, he doesn't speak any of the local languages, and he's far from any kind of scholar on the region. And he was something that folks from the very beginning out of the Gulf, out of Saudi Arabia, out of the United Arab Emirates, out of places like Israel as well saw as someone who is perfectly pliable, someone that they can pocket, someone they can target, someone they can in many ways also finance to do their bidding. Again, the piece has all these details that I forgot about from the very first term of Donald Trump, of figures like Mohammed bin Salman or other officials in the region saying, look how gullible this guy is, look how easy he is to buy off. And of course, look what that means for a pro Saudi or pro Emirati or pro Israeli policy. And we've all been paying the price for it in the decades since. Yeah, yeah.
- [04:00]
A
So here's a guy who had, obviously, business dealings that predated a lot of his diplomatic things, but who had just been going, shaking a hat to many of these same countries for his personal business dealings, even prior to really getting involved with any of them in a diplomatic capacity at all. Right.
- [04:19]
B
Yeah. Well, I mean, look, there's three basic chapters to Jared Kushner's life as a diplomat, slash financier, slash. I guess the term of art we're using today, Andrew, is fail son in chief or. Or fail son in law. I suppose the first chapter, of course, was Donald Trump's first term. When Kushner is overseeing the Middle Eastern portfolio portfolio. He's having these late night texting sessions with mbs, he's having these secret trips to Riyadh. He's acting as basically a back channel for all of these different governments, all of these different autocracies around the world. Of course, Donald Trump leaves the White House January 20, in 2021. And almost immediately, Jared Kushner begins monetizing those relationships. He starts a brand new firm called Affinity Partners that almost instantly begins opening up multi billion dollar deals in a way we have again, never seen before from a former official, let alone a relative of a former American president. Opening that much more financing again from the Saudis, from the Emiratis, and from the Israelis as well. That is the second chapter when, when Donald Trump is out of the presidency, out of the White House, and Jared Kushner is profiting from that. And again, fast forward to early 2025 for the final chapter, which we're now all going through in real time when Jared Kushner is bro, brought back to the White House, even though he says he will have nothing to do with Donald Trump's second term, suddenly he's the point person, not just for the Middle east, but for everything from Russia and Ukraine to now the Iran war and the failed Iran negotiations, all while still being paid head over foot by all of these regimes and making more money than he has ever made before.
- [05:58]
A
I really liked the detail in your reporting here that when Kushner was standing up this new firm, the Affinity Partners, and going around basically saying, hey, why don't we manage some of your money for you? That even, even, you know, the Saudi officials who were, who were in place to kick the tires on these sorts of proposals were basically like, this one really isn't doing it for us. Right. Can you just, can you just tell us a little bit about what happened with that?
- [06:22]
B
Yeah, sure. So Jared Kushner, early 2021, he puts this new fund together, and again, this is a guy without any private investment, private equity experience whatsoever. By all appearances, he's simply monetizing the relationships that he developed or under Trump's first term. And he's going around the world, including to the Middle east, to gin up investment in this new fund. And one of the places that he goes is Saudi Arabia. And he has this whole pitch about how he can help accelerate transformation and find new value added. It's a completely vapid, completely valueless pitch that is full of all this kind of, again, corporate pablum. And the Saudi officials that are supposed to be screening all of these investments, they, you know, they run a due diligence report, and it comes back and it says it's, quote, unsatisfactory in all aspects. So even the Saudis at the time are looking at this and saying, why would we bother investing in this? This guy has no experience. There's no clear means of any kind of profitability. We should actually avoid this. We should. We don't want to deal with the PR blowback. We don't want to deal with the questions. We should distance ourselves from Kushner. But of course, in Saudi Arabia, there's only one, one voice, one vote that matters, and that's Mohammed bin Salman. And mbs, again, being Kushner's longtime texting buddy, there's one report that he bragged about having Kushner in his pocket, and he immediately overrules all of these other Saudi officials and says, what are you guys thinking? This is absolutely someone we want to continue doing financial arrangements with, because who knows what the future holds. And look, far be it from me to give credit to MBS for any kind of foresight, for anything, but this is a deal that has absolutely continued paying off for the Saudis, because again, early 2025, here comes Kushner back to the White House, back to doing all of these deal, and of course, overseeing Middle Eastern policy once more.
- [08:08]
A
I felt exactly the same way reading that, by the way. Just look, you got to hand it to him. There were not necessarily a lot of people who thought that Jared Kushner was going to once again be a really financially and politically valuable contact. But I guess MBS managed to cash that bet, and it has paid off for him pretty handsomely. I mean, you gestured toward this a little bit already. Just how expansive Kushner's diplomatic portfolio has been since coming back to the White House. This is a phenomenon we've. We've talked about a lot. I feel like on a lot of our platforms is just like Trump has, like, six guys doing all the work for him right now. And Jared Kushner is one of two of them when it comes to a lot of this diplomacy, especially in the Middle East. But can you just kind of talk us through his. His involvement in the Gaza conflict and the Ukraine conflict specifically?
- [08:56]
B
Yeah. So he is generally Joined by another guy named Steve Witkoff, who is another New York real est kind of would be tycoon. He has known Donald Trump for years and years. They go back decades. So that's the reason that Trump has also kind of attached Kushner and Witkoff at the hip.
- [09:12]
A
Witkoff also the business partner of Don Jr. And Eric on World Liberty Financial and a bunch of the other, you know, crypto related schemes. So just to give a quick point of how incestuous this all is. Sorry.
- [09:23]
B
Well, yeah, of course. And another guy who has no diplomatic history, he has no regional expertise, he's certainly not a scholar, he doesn't speak the local languages whatsoever, and by all appearances is viewed as someone who is just as gullible, just as tractable and just as pliable as Jared Kushner. So again, Kushner comes back in early 2025. He doesn't have an official position at the time. He is, as he still claims to be technically a volunteer who is just doing his patriotic duty to help America and American interests. And of course, it would never have anything to do with his own private finances. Why would we ever think such a thing? But initially, Trump says, President Trump at the time says, Jared, you and Witkoff are in charge of Gaza policy, broader Israel, Palestine policy. And of course, Kushner himself has his own extensive history, has been connected to Benjamin Netanyahu for years and years. His family supported settlements in the west bank. And Kushner is generally perceived as being someone who is explicitly pro Israel in his policies. But again, Kushner is now trying to lead the next chapter for what will create, as he calls it, a new Gaza. Whether that has any room for any Palestinians whatsoever doesn't necessarily seem to be the case. But this is what Kushner's initial focus is on. Fast forward to the second half of 2025, and Trump has a little bit more work for him. He says, Kushner, you and Wyckoff are now overseeing the Ukraine portfolio as well. And he will be leading negotiations with Moscow. He's generating a relationship with a Russian guy who is sanctioned named Kirill Dmitriev, who, again, as we know from federal documentation, was the guy that Putin tasked with cultivating. Kushner, again, because he sees him as someone who he can influence and maybe there are some potential dealings there. And the Russians are saying, look, if you drop sanctions and if you give us much of what we want in Ukraine, including all of this territory the Ukrainians have not yet given up, then we will open up all of these new financial dealings worth trillions of dollars to American investors. So that's Kushner's 2025. And then we have 2026. And now we have Kushner leading negotiations along with Wyckoff on Iran going back and forth from Europe to have these sit down meetings with Iranian officials. And as we know now, as again, I've been able to report in this piece and others have shared elsewhere, Kushner and Wyckoff by all appearances, have no idea how nuclear policy works. Again, these are not nuclear experts. They didn't seem to get the advice of any kind of nuclear experts whatsoever. Kushner, as we report in the piece, went back saying the Iranians are weeks, if not days away from a nuclear weapon, which again, is a position very few others shared, of course, that the Israeli government shared that as well. But this is what led directly to the failure of those negotiations and now the ongoing war that we are still dealing with. I will say, Joe Andrew, he is still Jared Kushner, the head of Gaza policy, still the head of Ukraine policy, and of course, still trying to find a way through these ongoing bungled negotiations in Iran. It's a lot for anyone, let alone someone who has financial entanglements with all three.
- [12:21]
A
Can you just drill down.