Jared Kushner’s official title is Special Envoy for Peace, which is the job you get when your father-in-law owns the building and the previous occupant was a conflict. It appears at the top of a letter Jamie Raskin sent him in April, directly above his other title, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Affinity Partners, and the letter’s thesis is that a man cannot hold both titles at once. Kushner’s reply, in the sense of a document, has not been made public. His reply, in the sense of a career, is that of course he can, and that the second title is how you pay for the first.
What follows is the record. The jokes are structural and I apologize for none of them.
The building, first, because everything in this story is a building. In January 2007 Kushner, then 26, paid $1.8 billion for 666 Fifth Avenue, which was at the time the most anyone had ever paid for a single office building in Manhattan and remained, for the next eleven years, the most anyone had ever regretted it. The tower bled money through the financial crisis. By 2017 the family needed a partner, and in April of that year Charles Kushner met the finance minister of Qatar to ask for one. Qatar declined. Two months later Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates blockaded Qatar, and Jared, by then a senior adviser to the president, supported the blockade. In 2018 a firm called Brookfield, among whose largest investors was the Qatar Investment Authority, took a 99-year lease on 666 Fifth and paid roughly $1.1 billion of it up front, which rescued the Kushners. The blockade was lifted in 2021. Nobody has established that these events are connected, which is the sentence that appears in every account of them, including this one.
The clearance. In 2017 Kushner filed the SF-86, the form on which a person seeking access to the nation’s secrets lists every foreign contact of the preceding seven years, and left off more than a hundred of them, which he corrected in subsequent filings the way one might correct a grocery list by adding the groceries. Career officials recommended against granting him top-secret access. In 2018 the president overruled them and ordered it granted, and the chief of staff, John Kelly, wrote a memo saying so, because he wanted it on record that the order had come from upstairs. That record exists. It is the first of several documents in this piece written by people who wanted it known that the decision was not theirs.
The fund. Affinity Partners was founded, by the Judiciary Committee’s count, on January 21, 2021, the day after the inauguration of the next president, which for a man who had spent four years in government is an admirable lack of a cooling-off period. Within six months the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, committed $2 billion to it. Kushner had never run an investment fund. The PIF’s own screening panel noted this. In documents the New York Times later obtained, the panel cited “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management,” found the firm’s operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects,” and warned of “public relations risks.” The fund’s board, chaired by the crown prince, overruled the panel. The crown prince was the man the Office of the Director of National Intelligence concluded, in a report declassified in February 2021, had approved the operation to capture or kill Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, in a consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The $2 billion was committed months later. Kushner’s qualifications were, in the panel’s assessment, nil; in the crown prince’s, four years of WhatsApp.
The fees. By 2024, according to Senate Finance Committee findings, Affinity had collected about $157 million in management fees, $87 million of it paid directly by the Saudi government, and had returned to its investors no profits at all. The structure is the industry’s usual one: a management fee whether or not the manager makes any money, and a share of the profits if he does. The second half has not come up. Qatar and an Emirati fund called Lunate added $1.5 billion in 2024. By Raskin’s letter the firm raised another $1.2 billion in 2025 alone and now holds $6.16 billion, of which $6.10 billion, or 99 percent, comes from foreign nationals, which is to say from three governments with whom the Special Envoy for Peace is currently negotiating peace. In March the Times reported he had gone back to the crown prince for more. One of the firm’s larger positions is a 1.1 percent slice of the $52.5 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, most of the rest of which belongs to the PIF, meaning the crown prince now owns the company that makes the football game, and Kushner owns enough of it to be invited to the meetings.
The envoy. His diplomatic portfolio, per the letter, includes Gaza, where he negotiated a 2025 agreement that the committee notes failed to end the war but interested the Saudi, Emirati and Qatari governments considerably; Ukraine, where his ceasefire work involved contact with major Russian financiers and produced, in Raskin’s phrase, no measurable progress; and Iran, where the Saudi government reportedly pressed for the war to continue and the crown prince, as Affinity’s largest investor, holds what the letter calls financial leverage over the negotiator. Kushner’s view of Gaza was recorded at Harvard in February 2024, before the title: its “waterfront property could be very valuable,” and the thing to do was “move the people out and then clean it up.” A year later his father-in-law announced the Riviera. There is also a Board of Peace, to which the president invited Hungary at Davos in January, and about which the committee has asked for all communications. On October 6 CNN reported on Affinity’s investments in Israeli technology companies tied to the defense establishment, and a senior House Democrat announced an investigation the same day. The line in the letter that will outlive it: “You cannot both be a diplomat and a financial pawn” of the Saudi monarchy at the same time. The letter was due answered by April 30. No answer has been made public, and it is October.
The island. In December 2024, a month after the election, the government of Albania declassified Sazan, a 5.7-square-kilometer former military island in a marine park off Vlorë, for civilian use, and in January 2025, days before the inauguration, granted a Kushner-affiliated entity “Strategic Investor” status, which fast-tracks permits. The plan is a €1.4 billion resort across the island and the adjacent Zvërnec coast, which sits on the Narta lagoon, one of the Balkans’ most important wetlands and a stopover for several hundred species of migratory birds, among them the pink flamingo, which is how a private equity project came to be the subject of something Albanians now call the Flamingo Revolution. Protests began in late May. Banners read “Albania is not for sale” and “Ivanka, go home.” Footage showed the project’s private guards dragging a protester along a cliff edge; two security firms lost their licenses. On June 1 Albania’s special anti-corruption prosecutor confirmed an investigation into the changes to the island’s protected status and land bought without tenders. In July a court freed the arrested protesters. By last week the movement had grown into a student uprising in Tirana against the government itself, with rubber bullets, tear gas, hundreds of arrests, and a prime minister, Edi Rama, explaining that the demonstrators had been “ideologized and radicalized” by antifa. Rama is a close friend of the Kushner family. The resort, by the account of people on the ground, is under construction. The flamingos have not commented, and are not expected to be consulted.
The ruin. In Belgrade there is a building called the Generalštab, the former headquarters of the Yugoslav army, which NATO bombed in 1999 and which has stood since as a protected ruin and a memorial. Kushner’s plan was to turn it into a luxury hotel, and to do that Serbia had to strip its protected status, which it did in 2024, on the strength of an expert opinion that turned out, by last May, to have been forged. The culture minister and three others were indicted for abuse of office and forgery of an official document. Kushner’s firm pressed on through the summer, and the Serbian parliament passed a special law to clear the way, and then on December 15 the firm told the Wall Street Journal it was stepping aside out of respect for Serbia, with a sentiment about projects that bring people together, which is the private equity equivalent of a breakup text, sent to a building. Vučić, who the Guardian reported had pushed to strip the building’s protection himself, put the lost investment at “at least 750 million euros” and said the state and nation were the “major losers.” On Sunday night Vučić lost the election. The ruin remains a ruin, which, given the alternatives on offer, is the best outcome in this piece.
The father. Charles Kushner went to federal prison in 2005 for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering, the last of which involved hiring a prostitute to seduce his own brother-in-law, filming it, and mailing the tape to his sister. He was pardoned in December 2020 and is now the United States ambassador to France. In August 2025 Paris summoned him over a letter he wrote to Macron accusing France of not doing enough about antisemitism; he sent his deputy. In February of this year Paris summoned him again, over a State Department post blaming “violent radical leftism” for a killing in Lyon; he didn’t appear, and the French foreign minister announced that no minister of the government would meet him until he did. He is, as of this writing, an ambassador to a country whose ministers will not meet him, which is the family business in miniature: a title and a locked door.
The book. On Thursday Vanity Fair ran an excerpt from “Princes and Thieves,” by the investigative journalist Matthew Cole, which Simon & Schuster then released two days early, on Sunday. The excerpt alleges that during the first term Kushner had access to roughly $2 billion in Gulf-funded accounts, one at First Abu Dhabi Bank and one, of about $1 billion, allegedly held in Israel for his benefit; that Dutch intelligence, having turned a Russian military intelligence operative in 2017, found screenshots from Kushner’s iPhone on a GRU server and spent the next years watching him use it. Kushner called the allegations “completely insane” and “outrageous fabrications,” noted that the author produced no bank statements, wire records, account numbers or transaction dates, and had his lawyers send a 13-page letter to the publisher and a second to Condé Nast. The president called it “a totally false story.” The Jerusalem Post pulled its own article aggregating the claims, citing factual questions. The Bank of Israel said it knew of no such arrangement. No outlet has independently confirmed any of it, and this piece doesn’t either. I include it for one reason: it is the only part of the Kushner story that anyone has had to deny. Everything above it is on the public record, filed, audited, indicted or declassified, and the facts in it are not in dispute.
The comparison. Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian gas company for about a million dollars a year, made some millions more from Chinese partners, was investigated by the Justice Department for five years, was convicted of three felonies in June 2024, pleaded guilty to nine tax charges in September, was pardoned by his father in December, and was the subject of a House impeachment inquiry into the president on the theory that the son’s business was the father’s corruption. Jared Kushner has taken $6.16 billion from three foreign governments, 99 percent of his fund, while negotiating with those governments on behalf of the United States under a title his father-in-law invented; has had his firm’s competence rated “unsatisfactory in all aspects” by the people who funded it anyway; has had a hotel site in Belgrade de-protected on a document prosecutors say was forged and an island in Albania fast-tracked in the week before the inauguration; has a father who was pardoned for the prostitute and the tape and whom French ministers now decline to meet; and has never been charged with anything. The House that spent a year on the gas company has, through its minority, sent him a letter. No answer has surfaced. He has a title, and the title is Peace.
We need a new Emoluments Clause. The ones that we have don't work. They were written long ago for an era that no longer exists. I know that amending the Constitution is a pain but it has to be done. I think that we can get to 2/3 & 3/4 on this issue. There would be lots of support on both sides of the aisle. In the meantime, IF the Dems regain control of Congress in November (actually 1/3/27, I guess) there is a lot they can do to clean up their own house.
Jared Kushner = Epstein class corruption and debauchery