The Disturbing Return Of The Prodigal Son-In-Law

Jared Kushner is so back, and what he's up to should concern us all.

White House senior adviser Jared Kushner listens as President Donald Trump gives a speech. Photo by Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images.

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.

At the same time that Ivanka was working on Opportunity Zones, Jared owned a significant financial stake in a company called Cadre, which offers investment vehicles under the Opportunity Zones program. When Trump and Kushner entered the administration, Kushner’s stake in Cadre was valued between $5 million and $25 million. The value would rise to $25 million to $50 million. Kushner originally failed to disclose his ownership in Cadre. Despite the fact that the top White House ethics official determined at one point that it was “reasonably necessary” for him to divest from Cadre in order to do his job at the White House, he never did.

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.

Kushner said the quiet part out loud when he told the Harvard Kennedy School of Government’s Middle East Initiative last year that “Gaza’s waterfront property could be very valuable.” He expanded on these designs this past October when he weighed in on “reconstruction plans” for the region, framing the rebuilding of a “new Gaza” as somewhere “to give the Palestinians living in Gaza a place to go, a place to get jobs, a place to live.”

This emphasis on construction sheds light on why Trump’s primary “peace envoy” in his second term is Steve Witkoff, another billionaire real estate developer.

As The New York Times reported at the time,

Last Friday, when Jared Kushner heard that Hamas would begin talks to release Israeli hostages, he was fielding calls at his mansion, which sits on a man-made island just north of Miami. He jumped into his car and drove the 20 minutes to another mansion — this one owned by the billionaire Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s Middle East peace envoy.

The two real estate developers, charged with closing the deal on a prime piece of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions, got to work setting up a command center, where they made and fielded calls from stakeholders, including an impatient president and cabinet members in the Israeli government.

“A prime piece of Mr. Trump’s foreign policy ambitions,” indeed.

And sure enough, real estate development of the region is already well underway. As The Real Deal reported in an article titled “Kushner and Witkoff pitch Gaza reconstruction as $50B real estate play”:

In an extended “60 Minutes” interview on Sunday, the developer duo outlined what amounts to a roughly $50 billion master plan to reconstruct Gaza’s war-shattered housing and infrastructure.

The two, who helped broker the recent ceasefire agreement, said a newly formed “Board of Peace” would oversee contracting and financing for the redevelopment. Witkoff, founder of the Witkoff Group, told “60 Minutes” the group has already begun discussions with regional contractors.

Designs on Ukraine?

This talk of billions in redevelopment opportunities in war-ravaged Gaza, now conveniently in the hands of the international negotiators, raises an important question elsewhere: What exactly are Kushner and Witkoff doing now at the heart of Trump’s Russia/Ukraine negotiations?

Just last week, Trump deployed Kushner and Witkoff to Moscow for five hours of direct negotiations with Vladimir Putin, with further talks in Miami. And while little progress was reported, particularly because the terms of the negotiations amounted to a Putin wishlist opposed by Zelenskyy, on Wednesday Reuters reported on what the Trump team’s play might be:

Proceeding with reconstruction of Ukraine after the destruction wrought by Russian air raids and frontline combat has become a major element in discussions on a settlement, along with security guarantees and concerns over territory.

“The principles of the economic document are completely clear and we are fully aligned with the American side,” Zelenskiy said.

“An important common principle is that for reconstruction to be of high quality and economic growth after this war to be tangible, real security must be at the core. When there is security, everything else is there too.”

When Trump seeks “peace” he and his envoys like Kushner also see dollar signs, all associated with the massive price tag to rebuild from the devastation of war.

The conflicts of interest are incalculable. After all, the greater the destruction, the more opportunities there will be to secure massive redevelopment funds to rebuild.

The Hostile Takeover

Kushner’s Affinity Partners lies at the heart of all of these impending “reconstruction” deals. So it’s worth noting who all stands to benefit financially from the development of war-ravaged Gaza and Ukraine, other than Trump and his family.

According a New York Times report on Kushner from last April,

His $3 billion fund is financed almost entirely from overseas investors with whom he worked when he served as a senior adviser in the Trump White House. He has taken money from government wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, as well as from Terry Gou, a founder of Foxconn, the Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, whose role in Mr. Kushner’s firm has not been previously disclosed.

In total, 99 percent of the money placed with him by investors has come from foreign sources, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission in late March.

Mr. Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, is collecting approximately $40 million a year in management fees from those investors even before any share of profits earned on investments. He has made 10 investments to date, totaling $1.2 billion, many of them in companies based abroad.

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.

WBD’s board had already rejected a Paramount/Affinity deal prior to accepting Netflix’s offer, partly due to the former’s reliance on Saudi financing, which also presented an addiitional hurdle from U.S. regulators. Ellison hopes a sweetened pot, as well as a new agreement on the part of Affinity, will win over WBD shareholders despite objections from the board. Under the new offer, as The Independent noted,

Affinity, along with the sovereign wealth funds from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, have “agreed to forgo any governance rights – including board representation – associated with their non-voting equity investments,” according to Monday’s filing. The Middle Eastern public investment funds were also part of Paramount’s original Warner bid last week.

Another wrinkle is how amenable Donald Trump himself is to the deal. Per The Independent, Ellison is making the case for Paramount that “his offer has a better chance of clearing regulatory hurdles with the Trump administration.” Part of that, of course, is the cozy relationship Trump has with Ellison. But another potential factor—a clear conflict of interest—is that his own son-in-law stands to benefit from a deal with Paramount.

Trump has already signaled his intention to “be involved” in his administration’s regulatory review of the deal, saying the Netflix agreement “could be a problem” due to concerns of a greater consolidation among two streaming giants. But Trump likely has little concern about monopolistic practices. Rather, he sees Ellison and Kushner as a dream team alliance, particularly if the deal includes CNN.

As Trump recently made clear, per Variety, it is “imperative” that CNN be part of the deal.

Trump, speaking Wednesday at a White House meeting, told reporters that as part of “any deal” for Warner Bros. Discovery, it “should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately.” The president said, “I think I think CNN should be sold because I think the people that are running CNN right now” are “either corrupt or incompetent.” Trump said he didn’t want the current CNN management to be rewarded by being allowed to continue running the network “with money” from a deal.

“I don’t think the people that are running that company right now and running CNN, which is a very dishonest group of people, I don’t think that should be allowed to continue,” Trump said. “I think CNN should be sold along with everything else.”

Put plainly, Kushner is now openly helping foreign countries—ones that he has close and deep personal financial ties to—purchase one of the crown jewels of U.S. news media. President Trump is openly signaling that he will put his finger on the scale of regulatory approval of the merger—meaning in favor of Paramount and against Netflix. And the new owners of CNN would be eager to do Trump’s bidding when it comes to who works at the network and what they get to say.

As with “peace talks” where Kushner now holds sway over the lives of millions, all so he can apparently steer enormous redevelopment opportunities toward himself and his friends, Kushner’s involvement in the bid to purchase CNN breaches every ethical wall. It hands Kusher’s father-in-law the final say over a deal that will make the Trump family even wealthier, all while putting free speech and American democracy itself at high risk if CNN falls under the control of Trump’s right-wing allies.

Jared Kushner has indeed returned to the public stage and inserted himself squarely at the center of major negotiations. And the sheer corruption and damage he has wrought is already breathtaking.