SHOULD JARED KUSHNER BE GIVEN A TOP-SECRET SECURITY CLEARANCE?

…Jared’s sister at the real estate presentation in Beijing, China

 

White House legal advisers are still grappling with the sprawling nature of Jared Kushner’s assets.

 

You know, there is something very fishy about the president’s relationship with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. 

 

Just as there’s something fishy about Trump never saying a bad word about Russia’s Vladimir Putin....?

 

But for the son-in-law, why did Jared inadvertently leave some serious issues off of his financial disclosure for a top-secret security clearance?  I mean, the papers that are filed for receiving the kind of security clearance for a senior advisor to the President of the United States, they are obviously very exacting and very involved.   The complete package has about 100 pages and the questions are highly detailed.  When they ask for your financial involvements, they mean “ALL OF THEM”, not just those that make you look good.

 

So regarding Jared, let’s consider the situation when Jared’s sister dropped his name while pitching a real estate development project called One Journal Square in Jersey City, New Jersey.  This sales pitch was to wealthy Chinese investors in Beijing, China.  One of Jared’s lawyers quickly had to release a statement that he had already divested all interests in that venture known as One Journal Square.

But did he really divest himself? 

 

 

No, he instead sold his ownership stake in the project to his mother’s trust.  Jared had also not informed the White House on his disclosure forms that he held what’s called a “contingent right” on that same project.  That is a right which normally allows an investor the opportunity to gain full ownership of the project if certain benchmarks of financial success are met, such as reaching their revenue targets.

 

None of this was known to anyone until after it was discovered that the "contingent right" no longer held any value because it had been connected to a prior version of the project that had fallen through.

 

The point here is that none of this was offered on the original disclosure forms.  All that was said on a later revised form was that “they had inadvertently omitted the details”.  Here you are asking for "the most difficult to obtain security clearance in the country", and your answer is, “Oops, sorry, my bad!”

 

Oh, and all of this doesn’t even touch the fact that, in that sales presentation to 100 potential Chinese investors in Beijing, his sister Nicole Kushner Meyer made this promise.  "If they were willing to put up $500,000, it would also include an exchange for a number of EB-5 visas granting fast-track immigrations of Chinese individuals into the United States."

These comments to investors in China by Ms. Kushner-Meyer have obviously come under strict scrutiny.  This is amid allegations that she was trying to use her brother’s position as a White House senior adviser to lure investors.  Oh, and BTW, Kushner divested that former "contingent right" into his mother’s trust, just three days after his sister’s speech in Beijing to the 100 potential investors.

 

More than 100 days since President Trump’s son-in-law entered the White House, Trump’s White House legal advisers are still grappling with the sprawling nature of Jared’s assets.

…This is the first tower of the planned multiple towers of One Journal Square in Jersey City, New jersey.

 

Kushner’s lawyer, Blake Roberts, said that he stood by his initial statement that his client had divested from One Journal Square.   “Jared divested that legacy "contingent right" as soon as it came to our attention,” Roberts said.

 

But Kushner did not include that contingent right, that is just one of 27 "rights" related to Kushner Company properties, in his financial disclosure form first filed in late March. The rights were first disclosed in July in another amended form with that notice that they had been “inadvertently omitted.”  Josh Raffel, Kushner’s White House spokesman, said that the divestiture of the "contingent right" was not triggered by Ms. Meyer’s comments.  But it was part of a process that was already underway.  But Raffel declined to make Mr. Kushner available for an interview as to when the divestiture was actually started.

 

By the morning after the notice of Jared’s sisters comments in Beijing, Kushner’s team had received a flood of media inquiries about the possible ethical issues posed by his sister’s remarks in Beijing.

 

Attorney Roberts issued a statement explaining that Jared is not a beneficiary of his mother’s trust.  He also suggested that the Office of Government Ethics (OGE) had already been told that Jared had pledged to recuse himself from any discussions involving EB-5 visas.  But what has that to do with his sister’s offer of visas to the Chinese investors….?

 

And there’s more!

 

Kushner’s lawyer has also said that the original contingent right was dependent on a now-defunct deal with WeWork, a start-up company that specializes in shared working spaces. When the One Journal Square project was pitched to New Jersey officials, WeWork was both an equity partner and the planned anchor tenant.

 

However, Bloomberg News later reported that WeWork was no longer involved in the deal as an anchor tenant….?

 

Then a spokesman for WeWork, said that WeWork was still an equity partner in One Journal Square. He also said WeWork had no knowledge of any Kushner Company’s "contingent rights" for the project.

 

Through a spokesman, Laurent Morali, the president of Kushner Company, said “the decision was made mutually by WeWork and us to an amicable "parting-of-the-ways" last year. We’ve been in the process of negotiating an agreement that is about to be final.”

 

So, which is it?  What is the real deal between WeWork and Kushner Co….?

 

Now, the most significant revisions on Kushner’s latest disclosure form involves even another company called BFPS Ventures. On Kushner’s first form, this company was labeled as "a New York City real estate valued at over $50 million".

However, after the disclosure revision, BFPS’s value decreased to less than $25 million and it was relabeled, not as a real estate item, but as a holding company.  A company that contained the "27 contingent rights" plus Kushner’s stake in another company, Cadre, a real-estate investment venture.  But this is another company founded with Jared’s brother, Joshua.

 

Don Fox, who previously served as a general counsel and acting director of the OGE, said that he had read through Kushner’s new public form and noticed the revisions related to BFPS.  “Maybe it took them that long to peel back the onion that is BFPS Ventures and to figure out everything that’s in it,” Fox said. “There’s a lot of confusing stuff in it.” 

(Yeah think?)

 

But there’s still more……..

 

The new Kushner disclosure form included a position that Kushner had also not previously disclosed. He had served as the managing member of BFPS Ventures from 2011 until May 2017.  According to a disclosure footnote, Kushner had intended to resign from BFPS last January, but………..what happened?  Why didn't he resign?

 

Kushner has still kept most of his real estate business while being a senior advisor to the president.  But he offers few clues about potential White House conflicts which there appears to be many.  And just from what we have found out so far, I have the feeling that what we will end up knowing this is all the small tip of a very large ice berg.

 

Copyright G.Ater  2017