Jared Kushner’s Saudi Arabia-funded investment firm is finally being seriously examined. Senate Democrats have launched an investigation into Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, seeking information about the company’s investments—after it received $2 billion of its $2.5 billion in investments from Saudi Arabia.
Senate Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden, is leading the investigation, noting the peculiarities of nepobaby Kushner’s involvement in business dealings he has next to no experience doing. In a letter Wednesday asking Kushner’s firm to respond to queries about their investors, Wyden wrote:
Mr. Kushner’s limited track record as an investor, including his nonexistent experience in private equity or hedge funds, raise questions regarding the investment strategy behind the seeding investments and lucrative compensation that Affinity received from the Saudi PIF and other sovereign wealth funds.
Virginia Canter, former Treasury Department chief ethics counsel, told Salon that Kushner’s shady business dealings with Saudi Arabia, so soon after he and his father-in-law left the White House, raises serious national security concerns. “It’s one of the most egregious situations I’ve ever seen in decades of working in the federal government as an ethics official,” she said. “It appears to be a payoff as much as a potential investment.”
Kushner’s firm launched in 2021 and immediately received a majority of its funds from Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, with a whopping 99 percent of its funds coming from foreign sources. Kushner defended the flood of cash by pointing out that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s fund also invests in Nintendo, Uber, and Microsoft—which is more of an insult to those companies than it is a vouch for Kushner.
“The Saudi PIF’s decision to invest $2 billion in Affinity so soon after Kushner’s departure from the Trump White House raises concerns that the investment was a reward for official actions Kushner took to benefit the Saudi government, including preventing accountability for the Saudi government ordering the brutal murder of journalist and American citizen Jamal Khashoggi,” Wyden wrote.
In 2018, MBS oversaw the brutal assassination of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Trump’s White House paid no mind to the murder, instead releasing a shocking statement expressing support for Saudi Arabia and sowing doubt that MBS ordered Khashoggi’s murder, despite a CIA analysis that was certainly the case. Trump himself has curious ties to MBS, which during his presidency raised concerns of foreign influence.
This isn’t the first time Congress has sought answers into Kushner’s firm. In 2023, the stench of corruption was so putrid, Congress subpoenaed the company over its ties to Saudi Arabia, with even Republican James Comer saying Kushner’s Saudi blood money “crossed the line of ethics.”
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