Don't laugh, the Trump crime family has had its eyes on the Middle East for some time.
Kushner's Affinity's assets jump to $4.8 billion after Gulf cash injection
LONDON, March 28 (Reuters) - Jared Kushner's investment company Affinity Partners saw assets under management jump 60% last year to $4.8 billion, according to a regulatory filing, after it received a cash injection from Middle East investors including Qatar's sovereign wealth fund.
Kushner, son-in-law of U.S. President Donald Trump, launched the investment firm in 2021 after leaving the White House at the end of President Donald Trump's first term, when he was a top adviser on the Middle East.
Affinity secured $1.5 billion of extra capital in 2024 from two of its existing investors - Abu Dhabi-based Lunate and Qatar's sovereign wealth fund the Qatar Investment Authority - Kushner told an investment podcast in December.
Jared Kushner is so back, and what he's up to should concern us all.
Todd Beeton at The Big Picture:
During Donald Trump’s first term, his son-in-law Jared Kushner served as an unpaid “senior advisor” with his hands in many of Trump’s most infamous initiatives, including, according to CNN, “the border wall…relations with China, and the White House’s coronavirus response.”
Despite such monumental failures, as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) noted, by the end of the term, Kushner and wife Ivanka Trump raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in outside, ethically questionable income. Jared’s most brazen profit scheme involved a company called Cadre.
[...]
But Cadre would prove miniscule beside Kushner’s next steps after leaving the White House. In 2021, he both secured a 7-figure book deal for a tell-all memoir of his time in the White House and launched his own investment firm, Affinity Partners, which would go on to win billions of dollars in funding from Gulf states’ sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates. Earlier this year, Affinity Partners was among the entities that purchased Electronic Arts for $55 billion, a deal considered the “largest leveraged buyout in history.”
With all this financial success, based largely on connections secured during his time in government, it’s unsurprising that Kushner would be lured back into his father-in-law’s orbit, betraying his pledge after his ignominious 2021 exit from politics to spend time with his family “out of the spotlight” and to remain committed to “my investors, to my firm, to my employees, to my partners, and that’s what I’m planning to do.”
Now, Kushner is very much back, both on the world stage as a sort of second peace envoy under Donald Trump and as an investor in the attempted hostile takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery by Paramount Skydance.
What does this public re-emergence signal for Kushner, and what does it mean for Trump as he seeks to shore up post-presidential real estate deals abroad and consolidate media into a more Trump-friendly environment?
[...]
A developer’s dream in the Middle East
During Trump 1.0, the President deployed Kushner as a “Middle East whisperer.“ His biggest achievement was the Abraham Accords, which were signed in September of 2020. This agreement was widely hailed as a historic step toward normalizing relations between Israel and several so-called moderate Arab states, including the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
In retrospect, it was also a savvy move by Trump, who could claim a diplomatic victory in the Middle East while, as The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace puts it, “bypassing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” The Accords “led to peace agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco soon thereafter.”
At the time, Kushner’s involvement in diplomatic efforts was a head-scratcher. But now they make more sense, at least when viewed as primarily financial negotiations akin to real estate deals he brokered in his pre-White House career. In true Trumpian transactional fashion, in return for normalizing relations with Israel, “these nations would gain access to advanced technologies and fresh trade opportunities, motivated by a shared view of Iran as a strategic threat.”
A second head-scratcher occurred when Trump announced earlier this year that he had deployed Kushner to the Middle East once again, this time to help broker a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. Kushner was a private citizen now, not an official in the administration. As Trump told his cabinet at the time, “I put Jared there because he’s a very smart person and he knows the region, knows the people, knows a lot of the players.”
Trump once again got the headlines he wanted: A ceasefire agreement was signed on October 12, which led to the release of hostages as part of Phase 1 of the deal. Whether the deal will hold remains unclear; Israel has continued its bombing campaign, and aid deliveries to Gaza have fallen short of the terms of the October agreement. But after Kushner met last month with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to discuss next steps in the transition to Phase 2 of the agreement, a clearer picture of what’s in it for Kushner has emerged. And it’s not just his desire for world peace.
[...]
Now, Affinity is also at the heart of a new attempted hostile takeover of Warner Brothers Discovery (WBD) by Paramount Skydance.
Last week, Netflix had emerged as the winner of a bidding war for WBD with its $82.7 billion deal approved by the entertainment giant’s board of directors. Then Paramount chairman David Ellison came forward with an even sweeter deal, in part funded by Kushner’s Affinity Partners, that would value each share at $30, or a total valuation of $108 billion.
Jared Kushner is egregiously exploiting American lives to further enrich himself
Steven Beschloss at America, America:
Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner appeared on stage yesterday at a global investors’ conference in Miami. He explained why he likes leading a multibillion-dollar global investment firm.
“The cool thing about the investment business is you’re meeting with really smart people all the time,” Kushner said. “You get to choose which adventure you’re a part of.”
Among those “really smart people” he got to meet with was Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince who oversees his country’s sovereign wealth fund and who green-lit the operation that led to the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The “cool” thing is that he got $2 billion from the Saudis to launch his fledgling equity firm, Affinity Partners, six months after his father-in-law left the White House.
This was despite the doubts expressed by a panel responsible for screening the sovereign fund’s investments—doubts that included the “inexperience” of Kushner’s fund managers, an “excessive” asset management fee, and ultimately found the firm “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”
But that panel did not weigh in on the over-arching importance of Kushner’s familial connection, nor the fact that he played a key role in defending the prince even after U.S. intelligence determined that he had approved the killing and dismemberment of Khashoggi. As the CIA report concluded, “We assess that Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved an operation in Istanbul, Turkey, to capture or kill Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”
All of this might seem like old news, albeit still deeply disturbing. You may recall Kushner said he had no plans to participate in a second Trump term, telling a podcaster in December 2024 that he would “pre-emptively try to avoid any conflicts” of interest and that his firm didn’t “have to raise capital for the next four years.”
But that was then. And now: Since he gets to “choose which adventure to be a part of,” and since his father-in-law came calling, how could he not team up with real estate developer and so-called Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to talk to the Iranians about a deal? Wasn’t he just the guy to conclude the Iranians were “not serious” about negotiating, essentially triggering his reckless boss’ decision to go to war? How could he not deploy all of his remarkable experience to help decide who lives and dies in the region?
And so what if this man, this financial investor who has no official government status, is now carrying out the most serious of responsibilities on behalf of the U.S. government which is planning to put American troops on the ground in Iran? So what if Jared’s current “adventure” did not include avoiding conflicts of interest or following U.S. law, facts he easily glosses over?
“Technically, I’ve not joined the administration,” he said yesterday in Miami. “I’m still just a volunteer and a businessman who volunteered to help the government when asked.”
Gosh, he sounds almost noble, amirite?
Except we since have learned that this “volunteer” was continuing to exploit his current adventure to try and raise another $5 billion for his firm. Forget that earlier lie about pre-emptively avoiding conflicts of interest and not needing more capital—not when the president is on the line and calls you into service. Not when there are billions more to rake in. As The New York Times blithely described the grifting, “The efforts show the blurring of the lines between public service and private profit-seeking during Mr. Trump’s second term.”
And while Kushner can conclude that the talks with Iran were not serious, leading Trump to launch a war days later, I guess we’re supposed to ignore the Washington Post report that Jared’s top funder, Mohammed bin Salman, “made multiple private phone calls to Trump over the past month advocating a U.S. attack, despite his public support for a diplomatic solution.” (This was according to four people “familiar with the matter.”)
President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a top White House official during Trump's first term.
Judd Legum, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims at Popular Information:
President Donald Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was a top White House official during Trump's first term. After exiting the White House in 2021, Kushner launched a new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, and announced he was seeking to raise $7 billion. Kushner had no experience in private equity, and his most significant business experience was nearly bankrupting his family's real estate company.
Who would be interested in giving Kushner billions of dollars? Kushner raised $2 billion from the government of Saudi Arabia through their Public Investment Fund (PIF). The PIF committee that screens investments recommended rejecting Kushner's proposal, citing "the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management" and "excessive" fees. The committee's recommendation, however, was overruled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), who Kushner formed a friendship with during his time in the White House. Kushner helped MBS manage the fallout after United States intelligence agencies determined MBS ordered the brutal murder of U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. To date, Kushner has raised $4.6 billion, including additional funds from Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.
From its inception, this arrangement was an ethical morass. Kushner is on the payroll of foreign governments and although he does not have a formal position in the second Trump administration, admitted that he still serves as an advisor to his father-in-law.
Things just got much worse.
Days before Trump's inauguration, Kushner partnered with his father-in-law's company, the Trump Organization, to develop a Trump-branded luxury hotel and apartment complex in Belgrade, Serbia. Affinity Partners is functioning as a vehicle for foreign governments, including Saudi Arabia, to enrich the President of the United States.
In an interview, Kushner insisted that this was all on the up-and-up. “We talked with several brands in the past year,” Kushner told Bloomberg in an interview. "I thought the tower would make a tremendous Trump Tower, so I spoke to Eric [Trump] about it, and he was very excited. So we’ll be bringing them in as our hotel partner.”
The development will be known as Trump Tower Belgrade and will be built on a former military site leased to Affinity Partners by the Serbian government. The complex will have 175 hotel rooms and sell 1,500 residences.
[...]
The Trump Organization's global ambitions
Trump Tower Belgrade is not the only foreign business deal that the Trump Organization has been involved in over the last few months.
In December, two new developments in Saudi Arabia were announced. Another real estate developer, DarGlobal, will own the sites, but pay the Trump Organization to use Trump branding. The Trump Organization will also work with DarGlobal on another project in the United Arab Emirates.
In October, the Trump Organization announced a partnership with a Vietnamese real estate developer to build a $1.5 billion golf course and hotel. Vietnam, which is the US trading partner with the fourth-highest trade surplus, could be heavily impacted if Trump imposes steep tariffs on the country’s exports to the US.
On January 10, the Trump Organization released an ethics statement outlining how it will seek to avoid conflicts of interest. The organization released a similar statement just before Trump took office for the first time in 2017.
The most glaring difference between Trump’s 2017 ethics statement and his current one is how they handle foreign business deals. In 2017, the ethics statement prohibited "without exception—new foreign deals during the duration of President-Elect Trump’s Presidency," including "any new deals with respect to the use of the 'Trump' brand or any trademark, trade name, or marketing intangibles associated with The Trump Organization or Donald J. Trump in any foreign jurisdictions." It also prohibited transactions with "with a foreign country, agency, or instrumentality thereof, including a sovereign wealth fund, foreign government official, or member of a royal family."
The current ethics statement does not include any restrictions on "foreign deals." Since real estate ventures like the new Trump Tower in Serbia require extensive government permitting to be completed, this could give foreign governments leverage over the president. Neither the Trump administration nor the Trump Organization have explained why that restriction will not be maintained during Trump's second term.
With the return of serial Emoluments Clause violator Donald Trump back into office, there is a renewed scrutiny of corruption of the Trump Organization and its global investments.
La presidencia como negocio: el imperio económico que los Trump construyeron desde la Casa Blanca
Por Bruno Sgarzini
Periodista argentino especializado en asuntos internacionales.
Memes coin, compras de grandes empresas de negocios y proyectos de hoteles de lujos en el medio de un desierto son algunos de los negocios cerrados por la familia Donald Trump durante su nuevo mandato presidencial. Se estima que desde 2017, los Trump han ganado un total de 3.400 millones de dólares tratos…
Rusya ve Amerika karşılıklı temaslarla yatırım işbirliğini güçlendiriyor
Rusya ve Amerika arasında yeni temaslar yatırım yoluyla güçleniyor
Devlet Başkanı Yardımcısı Yuriy Uşakov ile RDIF Başkanı Kirill Dmitriyev Rusya tarafını temsil ederken, Amerikalı iş dünyasının önde gelen ismi Jared Kushner da toplantıda yer aldı. Kushner, Affinity Partners adlı yatırım şirketinin kurucusu olarak dikkat çekiyor ve geçmişte ABD yönetimlerinde dış politika konularında danışmanlık…
Rusya ve Amerika karşılıklı temaslarla yatırım işbirliğini güçlendiriyor
Rusya ve Amerika arasında yeni temaslar yatırım yoluyla güçleniyor
Devlet Başkanı Yardımcısı Yuriy Uşakov ile RDIF Başkanı Kirill Dmitriyev Rusya tarafını temsil ederken, Amerikalı iş dünyasının önde gelen ismi Jared Kushner da toplantıda yer aldı. Kushner, Affinity Partners adlı yatırım şirketinin kurucusu olarak dikkat çekiyor ve geçmişte ABD yönetimlerinde dış politika konularında danışmanlık…
Electronic Arts será adquirida en un acuerdo de $55 mil millones liderado por el PIF saudí, Affinity Partners y Silver Lake
Electronic Arts (EA) anunció hoy que será vendida y retirada del mercado bursátil en un acuerdo de $55 mil millones. Los compradores incluyen el Fondo de Inversión Pública (PIF) de Arabia Saudita, Affinity Partners (dirigido por Jared Kushner) y la firma de capital privado Silver Lake.
PIF ya posee el 9.9% de EA, y en lugar de vender esa participación, invertirá más dinero en el acuerdo. Una vez…
