Jared Kushner is a subject of the FBI investigation, as confirmed by everyone in creation

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• Jared Kushner is a subject of the FBI investigation, as confirmed by everyone in creation

May 26, 2017 8:26am CDT by Mark Sumner

Kushner: "isn’t particularly bright or hard-working, doesn’t actually know anything, has bought his way into everything ever". Jared Kushner is a subject of the FBI investigation, as confirmed by everyone in creation

As NBC News has confirmed … that is, CNN has confirmed … and the Washington Post, and the BBC, and Reuters, and USA Today, and le Monde, and the Sheboygan Press confirm, Jared Kushner is now a focus of the Trump–Russia investigation.

Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law and one of his senior advisers, has come under FBI scrutiny in the Russia investigation, multiple U.S. officials told NBC News.

Investigators believe Kushner has significant information relevant to their inquiry, officials said.​

And every single one of those sources is careful to throw out this helpful tidbit.

That does not mean they suspect him of a crime or intend to charge him.

Here’s something that’s even more true that those articles don’t get around to saying:

Being the focus of an FBI investigation is not a good thing. It rarely ends with someone being awarded puppies and ice cream. And there’s every chance that Jared Kushner will eventually be charged with a crime.

So every time an article reminds you that Kushner hasn’t been charged, simply mentally append the word “yet.”

Because Kushner isn’t just a guy who hangs around and may have stumbled across a clue unawares. Kusher is a guy who met with a sanctioned Russian bank. Who met with Sergei Kislyak and later exchanged notes with him. And who failed to disclose multiple meetings with Russian officials when applying for security clearance. And that’s all in the past year after the Russian hacking scandal became public and after anyone with two functioning brain cells would know that the FBI was watching his every move.

At the moment, Kushner isn’t considered an actual target of the investigation—unlike Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who most definitely is. And also unlike Trump’s former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who seems to have carefully studied security regulations only so he could be sure of breaking them all.

Instead, Kushner is a “subject of interest” because his activities—all that meeting with Russians, talking with Russians, and also being a close associate of that that known Russian money-laundering schemer, Donald Trump—put him close to the bullseye when it comes to Trump–Russia targets.

Of course, compared with Trump, Kushner seems like a quieter more reserved brand of slum lord. What do people close to Kushner have to say about him? People like Harleen Kalon, who was hired to do a digital overhaul of the Kushner-owned Observer.

Just before the election, Kahlon described her former boss on Facebook thusly: “We’re talking about a guy who isn’t particularly bright or hard-working, doesn’t actually know anything, has bought his way into everything ever (with money he got from his criminal father), who is deeply insecure and obsessed with fame (you don’t buy the NYO, marry Ivanka Trump, or constantly talk about the phone calls you get from celebrities if it’s in your nature to ‘shun the spotlight’), and who is basically a shithead.”

Jared Kushner: Basically a shithead. But of course, there are other views.

“I think he is someone who saw all this shit with his father go down, and it turned him into a person who was determined to operate in much the same way but just be quieter about it,” said Brian Thomas Gallagher, who worked as a deputy editor at the paper during the Kushner era. “The idea that he thought the thing to do was to buy himself a position in the New York cultural elite is probably true in its way, but I don’t think he ever saw that way. He saw how poorly his dad was treated in the papers, and theObserverwas his tool or a house organ for his real estate company.”

Jared Kushner: Basically a shithead who uses his own newspaper to spread propaganda.

And also definitely the subject of an FBI investigation.


http://m.dailykos.com/stories/1666231


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[VAiz4hustlaz]

Just before the election, Kahlon described her former boss on Facebook thusly: “We’re talking about a guy who isn’t particularly bright or hard-working, doesn’t actually know anything, has bought his way into everything ever (with money he got from his criminal father), who is deeply insecure and obsessed with fame (you don’t buy the NYO, marry Ivanka Trump, or constantly talk about the phone calls you get from celebrities if it’s in your nature to ‘shun the spotlight’), and who is basically a shithead.”

No surprise here!

 

[QueEx]

ProPublica’s ‘Kushnerville’ Investigation '

Wins June Sidney Award
​

by Cynthia Gordy
ProPublica, June 14, 2017


ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis is the recipient of this month’s Sidney Award for his investigation, “The Beleaguered Tenants of ‘Kushnerville.’” Co-published with the New York Times Magazine, the story shines a light on Jared Kushner’s role as a real estate developer and landlord to hundreds of tenants in low-income housing units in the Baltimore suburbs.

MacGillis chronicled how President Trump’s son-in-law's company bought up rental complexes only to leave the homes in extreme disrepair, humiliate late-paying renters, and sue them for thousands of dollars when they try to move out. Before MacGillis’ reporting, few tenants knew who their landlord was.

“MacGillis has unmasked the president’s closest advisor as a slumlord,” said Sidney judge Lindsay Beyerstein. “His reporting raises urgent questions about whether Housing and Urban Development will enforce Section 8 housing regulations when the landlord is ‘Secretary of Everything.’”​

Administered by the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the monthly Hillman Award recognizes “outstanding journalism that fosters social and economic justice.”

​

https://www.propublica.org/atpropub...nerville-investigation-wins-june-sidney-award


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[QueEx]

Kushner Is Said to Have Ordered Flynn to Contact Russia

Now that the retired general has pleaded guilty, the president's son-in-law could be one of the next dominoes to fall.


By Eli Lake
December 1, 2017

Jared Kushner back when he was willing to be photographed next to Mike Flynn.

Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Former national security adviser Michael Flynn's guilty plea Friday for lying to the FBI is alarming news for Donald Trump. But the first person it's likely to jeopardize will be the president's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.


Two former officials with the Trump transition team who worked closely with Flynn say that during the last days of the Obama administration, the retired general was instructed to contact foreign ambassadors and foreign ministers of countries on the U.N. Security Council, ahead of a vote condemning Israeli settlements. Flynn was told to try to get them to delay that vote until after Barack Obama had left office, or oppose the resolution altogether.


That is relevant now because one of Flynn’s lies to the FBI was when he said that he never asked Russia's ambassador to Washington, Sergey Kislyak, to delay the vote for the U.N. Security Council resolution. The indictment released today from the office of special prosecutor Robert Mueller describes this lie: "On or about December 22, 2016, Flynn did not ask the Russian Ambassador to delay the vote on or defeat a pending United Nations Security Council resolution."


At the time, the U.N. Security Council resolution on Israeli settlements was a big deal. Even though the Obama administration had less than a month left in office, the president instructed his ambassador to the United Nations to abstain from a resolution, breaking a precedent that went back to 1980 when it came to one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the U.N.


This was the context of Kushner's instruction to Flynn last December. One transition official at the time said Kushner called Flynn to tell him he needed to get every foreign minister or ambassador from a country on the U.N. Security Council to delay or vote against the resolution. Much of this appeared to be coordinated also with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose envoys shared their own intelligence about the Obama administration's lobbying efforts to get member states to support the resolution with the Trump transition team.

(Kushner's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, did not return an email seeking comment for this column before deadline.)


For now it's unclear what to make of all of this. Lying to the FBI is a felony and always a serious matter. We also know from Flynn's "statement of the offense" that he lied to FBI agents as the bureau was investigating Russia's meddling in the 2016 election and any links between Russia and the Trump campaign in this period. Nonetheless, nothing in the Flynn plea sheds any light on whether the Trump campaign actually colluded with Russia to influence the election.

ABC News reported Friday that Flynn is prepared to tell Mueller's team that Trump had instructed him to make contact with Russia during the campaign itself. If those contacts involved the emails the U.S. intelligence community charges Russia stole from leading Democrats, then Mueller will have uncovered evidence of actual collusion between the president and a foreign adversary during the election. Impeachment could then be in the cards.

But it's also possible that the Justice Department became interested in Flynn's initial conversation with Kislyak on other, less explosive grounds. One leading theory pushed Friday by Democrats involves a violation of a 1799 statute known as the Logan Act. A relic of the John Adams administration, this discredited law makes it illegal for a private U.S. citizen to undermine the foreign policy of a sitting president in contact with a foreign power. No American has ever been successfully prosecuted under that law. Some





https://www.bloomberg.com/view/arti...-said-to-have-ordered-flynn-to-contact-russia


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How did Jared Kushner become the president's right hand man? Short answer: a lot of money

 

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Jared Kushner loses top-secret security clearance

sources tell CNNhttp://cnn.it/2BUd98p

 

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The corruption of Kushner

The Week

By Ryan Cooper

"Imagine if Obama did this" has become one of the tiredest clichés of the Trump presidency. But repetition has not actually robbed the comparison of its strength. President Trump has done and said quite literally hundreds of things during his first year in office that Republicans would have lost their minds over had Barack Obama done or said them. Many of these things would have prompted GOP demands for immediate impeachment hearings of America's 44th president.

Let us use the case of Jared Kushner as but one egregious example.

In any other administration, the simple fact of the president hiring an untested and inexperienced son-in-law as a senior aide — a 36-year-old real estate developer with precisely zero political experience suddenly tasked with brokering peace in the Middle East — would have been a presidency-shattering scandal. (Remember how Republicans freaked out when Bill Clinton had his wife, who had many years of actual political experience as Arkansas' first lady, run point on health care?)

Obviously, the Kushner situation is galactically worse than Trump simply hiring a relatively dim relative. Indeed, Kushner (who recently lost his Top Secret security clearance) is also up to his armpits in extremely shady business deals that reek of corruption. In a healthy democracy, law enforcement would already be closing in.


As Alex Pareene points out, the American mainstream media has such an instinctive deference to power that their operating principle on questions like this amounts to "if political elites do it, that means it's not corruption." But Kushner's behavior during his brief tenure as a senior White House official is stretching that to the absolute breaking point.

Let's just run through just a few publicly known facts and see if we can't connect the dots.

1. family business continues to be plagued by a bad New York City real estate deal

As this in-depth report from Bloombergdemonstrates, in 2007 Kushner Cos. set a New York record buying the skyscraper at 666 Fifth Ave. for $1.8 billion — all but $50 million of it borrowed. It was an extremely risky deal even before the economy and housing market collapsed and turned it into an economic black hole. They've been losing money on it ever since, covering up the problem by making a frenzy of deals without much more than surface-level involvement, and scrambling to get someone else to pay for a total redevelopment. Oh, and the entire remaining mortgage is due in less than a year, and the latest news is that Kushner Cos. is going to have to buy out Vornado Realty Trust from their 49.5 percent share in the property.


2. The head of the Kushner family business is a convicted criminal

As part of a bitter feud with his brother Murray and his sister Esther, Charles Kushner (Jared's dad) hired a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law William Schulder (husband of Esther) and film the encounter, which he then sent to his sister. For that he was convicted of tax evasion, illegal campaign donations, and witness tampering. He was sentenced to 24 months behind bars, and served 16 months in an Alabama prison and the rest in a New Jersey halfway house.

Charles is still running the Kushner real estate empire, by the way.

He has also hired two other ex-convicts — Avram Lebor and Richard Goettlich, who were busted for separate "sprawling fraud schemes" — to top jobs in the company. These are not people known for upright and honorable behavior.

3. Kushner's business has received large loans after meeting with businessmen at the White House

The New York Times reports that while Joshua Harris, a top executive at private equity firm Apollo Global Management, was meeting with Kushner to discuss infrastructure policy and a potential administration job for Harris, Apollo also loaned Kushner Cos. $184 million to refinance the debt on a Chicago property. That is three times the average real estate loan for Apollo. After Kushner met with Michael L. Corbat, the chief executive of Citigroup, the bank loaned Kushner Cos. $325 million for a development in Brooklyn. This cannot possibly be a coincidence.

This would all be incredibly damning even if Kushner's family business wasn't suffering through severe financial difficulties. Would big-time New York investors be giving loans to such a struggling business without the White House connection — and hundreds of potential favors that might thus be obtained? It frankly beggars belief.


4. Foreign governments have considered manipulating Kushner through his money needs and lack of experience

Officials in Mexico, China, the U.A.E., and Israel have reportedly considered manipulating Kushner in this way, and it's all but guaranteed that many others have had the same thought. A stupid, arrogant person, in way over his head and carrying around debts he can't repay — it's practically the textbook definition of "espionage target."

Ten years ago, all this would have probably been enough to launch a prosecution of Kushner under federal corruption laws. The "reasonable doubt" standard does not mean "no doubt whatsoever," for obvious reasons. Sometimes a crime is still bleedingly obvious even if there is no smoking gun evidence.

However, since the Supreme Court rulings in Skilling v. United States and McDonnell v. United States — exhibiting the classic character of modern jurisprudence combining callous disregard for the rights of workers, immigrants, or poor people with tender, loving compassion for those of corporations, politicians, or the rich — corruption cases have become nearly impossible to win. The new standard of proof of a clear-as-day quid pro quo is insurmountably high.

But that doesn't mean we can't see what's clearly in front of our eyes. If this were South Korea, where former president Park Geun-hye is facing up to 30 years for "alleged bribery, abuse of power, and other crimes," Kushner would have been hauled up and indicted months ago. It's mere American chauvinism that prevents this from being conventional wisdom.


http://theweek.com/articles/758357/corruption-kushner


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