Is Jared Kushner a 'walking conflict of interest'?

Fresh Air

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Dexter Filkins discusses Jared Kushner's dual role as a U.S. foreign policy envoy and private equity fund

Key takeaways

• Kushner operates as an unconfirmed government agent with significant influence despite not receiving a salary.
• His private equity firm is funded by foreign governments, creating potential conflicts of interest.

Main topics

• Jared Kushner's dual role in diplomacy and private business
• Conflict of interest in U.S. foreign policy

Notable quotes

He's potentially a walking conflict of interest.

Conclusion

Kushner's unique position blurs the line between public service and pr

Transcript preview

Speaker 5 (0:00) I haven't seen my son since 2012. This is Deborah Tice. The disappearance of her son, Austin, is one of the biggest missing person cases in the world. What do you want from me? I should solve the mystery. I know that my son is somewhere alive. Listen to Where Is Austin Tice from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4 on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:24) This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Jared Kushner. is once again playing an extraordinary role in American foreign policy. He's President Trump's son-in-law, and during Trump's first term, he was a senior White House advisor who became one of the administration's central players in the Middle East. Today, he's helping negotiate peace deals in some of the world's biggest conflicts, from Israel and Gaza, the Russian-Ukraine war, to the U.S. war with Iran. At the same time, Kushner runs a private equity firm, backed by billions of dollars from places like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. My guest, Dexter Filkins, spent months tracing how these two worlds overlap and what happens when diplomacy and private business become difficult to separate. Filkins is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who's covered wars and foreign policy for more than 25 years. His new piece is called Jared Kushner's Dollar Diplomacy. and Dexter Filkins. Welcome back to Fresh Air. Speaker 1 (1:29) Hi there. Speaker 2 (1:30) Okay, I want to start with this title because it uses the phrase dollar diplomacy. And Speaker 6 (1:37) a Speaker 2 (1:37) century ago, that essentially meant using American money and investment as an instrument of American power abroad. And so what does dollar diplomacy mean in Jared Kushner's hands? Speaker 1 (1:48) That was back when we had money to throw around. Yeah. Well, you touched on it at the top there. Jared has, Speaker 4 (1:57) he's wearing two hats right now. He's a diplomat, he's unpaid, but he's an agent for American foreign policy and for the White House and for President Trump on one Speaker 1 (2:07) hand. And on the other hand, he is managing a large private equity fund with several billion dollars in it, nearly all of which was gathered from foreign countries and foreign governments and their sovereign wealth funds. Speaker 4 (2:22) And so it's... He's potentially a walking conflict of interest. Speaker 6 (2:28) Right. You mentioned that he doesn't take a salary. He's not a cabinet secretary. He's not a confirmed ambassador. And the White House's position is that because he isn't paid, there is no conflict of interest. Speaker 4 (2:42) Yeah. I mean, that's what they say. I Speaker 1 (2:45) think that strains. it strains credulity. I sound like a lawyer in a courtroom, but I mean, it strains kind of believability. And I think most of the lawyers that I talk to who kind of work in the realm of government ethics were pretty clear about this. And basically what they said was, it doesn't really matter if he's taking a salary or he's taking a salary of a dollar a year or whatever. It doesn't matter. What matters is that he's acting as a government employee. He's acting as an agent of the United States government. And that... In every conceivable way, Jared Kushner is a government employee, whether he's making money at it or not. I talked to any number of government ethics professors, lawyers who said that and said it pretty clearly. This is the sort of thing that wouldn't have come up for debate. a decade ago. It just wouldn't have come up. I mean, the practice of former government employees cashing in on their former jobs in the private sector, I mean, that's a, you know, tried and true tradition. You know, you work at the Pentagon or whatever, and then you leave and then you lobby the Pentagon. Now, they've put a bunch of rules in place that have sought to separate those interests and slow the conflicts down so that When you leave the U.S. government, if you leave, let's say, the Treasury Department, like you can't lobby the Treasury Department or you can't lobby the executive branch for X number of years. It's not a long time. It's like, you know, two or three years or something. But you can't you can't like walk out of the building and then pick up the phone and say, hey, I'm available to, you know, lobby the Treasury Department. And all my former colleagues that I was just sitting with like two days ago, you can't do that, right? There's a cooling off period. Speaker 6 (4:35) I want to get into, though, what this undefined role actually looks like. And you write quite extensively about it in this piece. But first, I just want to lay the groundwork of what it looks like for Kushner out there. There's someone else by his side in a lot of his work, specifically in Iran and Ukraine, Steve Witkoff. He's a real estate developer. that President Trump has known for decades. Presidents have always kept wealthy friends close, often in ambassador roles. What does the president believe that these two, Kushner and Witkoff, can do that diplomats cannot? Speaker 1 (5:12) I think their titles are the peace envoys. Peace envoys, yeah. Yeah, go out and make peace in all the terrible places in the world. And God knows there's a lot of terrible places. But they're effectively... Secretary of State. I mean, that's really what they're doing. And, you know, Marco Rubio, who's wearing two hats of a different sort, he's the National Security Advisor and the Secretary of State. Typically, you know, like say when it was Anthony Blinken, who was Secretary of State under Biden, he traveled all the time. He was just like on a plane like 360 days out of the year that he was in. And the National Security Advisor typically kind of sits right next to the president, kind of briefs him every morning. And so in Rubio's case, he's really kind of acting like the now security advisor. He basically works in the White House. He travels a little bit, but not that much. So these guys, Wyckoff and Kushner, they're effectively the secretaries of state. They're running around and they're trying to make peace in some of the really intractable areas around the globe. So they've done negotiations with Iran. They've done negotiations in Gaza. They have done them in Ukraine. They've flown to places like that, places like where the United States is trying to kind of insert itself and separate the warring parties, except I should add in the case of Iran, where there wasn't a war going on until they got involved. But we can talk about that. Which we'll talk about. Speaker 6 (6:41) Yes, we will talk about. You know, Kushner's argument about their roles is basically the experts had... decades and they didn't solve many of the problems that we see. And so you've covered these wars and these diplomatic efforts for a very long time. Does he have a point? Speaker 4 (7:03) I think the mostly unstated but sometimes stated premise of what they're doing is that the ordinary Speaker 1 (7:09) bureaucracy of the United States government and the diplomatic core of the United States government, the whole foreign policy apparatus of the U.S. government is basically a big failure. And so these two very smart real estate guys, Speaker 4 (7:25) not knowing the history, not knowing the complexities, they can parachute in. And they can make peace because Speaker 1 (7:32) they're smart and they're quick and they're not burdened by all the baggage of the past. Kushner has said this out loud. He's like, look, I wouldn't be here, you know, in Gaza, in Ukraine. I wouldn't be here if you guys had succeeded. So the fact that I'm doing things a little bit differently, Speaker 4 (7:50) do you want me to just do the same thing and keep failing? So that's his argument. That's his argument. It's like, that's why Speaker 1 (7:57) I'm here. I'm here to do things differently. Speaker 6 (8:00) Well, let's talk about what Kushner's work actually looks like. So in his first term, President Trump handed his son-in-law the Middle East portfolio. And you write that Kushner built American policy in the region around Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS. He's now the crown prince and ruler of Saudi Arabia. At the time, he was not. next in line to the throne when this relationship started. Why him? Speaker 4 (8:33) Well, this is a very interesting story. This is back in 2017, so it's a long time ago. But President Trump came in and he kind of looked at the Speaker 1 (8:42) map of the Middle East and said, you know, Iran is doing whatever the heck they want. We need another ally out there. Who is it? It's going to be Saudi Arabia. Speaker 4 (8:50) And so what President Trump said was we're going to empower Saudi Arabia. as a kind of, as a counterweight to Iran. And Jared, you're going to take the file here. It's all yours. And there was a crown prince, Speaker 1 (9:04) Mohammed bin Nayef. He was very, very close to the American national security establishment and the intelligence agencies because he was very, very cooperative, particularly on terrorism. And so the buzz in the Middle East at the time was, yeah, but the really dynamic guy is not Mohammed bin Nayef. It's... Mohammed bin Salman, NBS. He's the young comer. He's the deputy crown prince. And so on top of all this is the king, King Salman, who's kind of very old and kind of, you know, gradually disengaging. So who's going to run the country became kind of the operating question. Speaker 4 (9:42) And what happened over the course of Trump's first term is that Jared became very close. I mean, they're friends. They play video games together. But Jared became... close to Mohammed bin Salman. Speaker 1 (9:55) They're the same age. They kind of see the world in the same way. I think it's fair to say they were two young guys and were, you know, cutting through all the dead weight. And so he became very close to Speaker 4 (10:07) him. He forms this alliance. And I think, but there's a pivotal moment in, I believe it's 2017, pretty early on. And that is they're talking on the phone, Speaker 1 (10:17) MBS and Jared. Speaker 4 (10:19) And Speaker 1 (10:19) MBS basically says, I'm going to make my move against Mohammed bin Nayef. Do I have the backing of the White House? And Jared said, yes, basically everybody's behind you. I think he said, with the exception of the intelligence agencies, who were very, very close to MBS's rival. But he said, basically, you've got the green light. Speaker 4 (10:39) And this call was secretly recorded. Yeah. So this was unknown until, you know, I talked to a lot of different people Speaker 1 (10:47) and I've been kind of working in the Middle East for a long time. And Jared denies all this, by the way. But the telephone call was taped and it was recorded. And so officials that I spoke to had seen the intercept, basically had seen a transcript of the intercept. So basically, Jared gives the green light to MBS to basically take over. because the father's kind of irrelevant at this point. And so he does. And so Speaker 4 (11:14) MBS makes his move. And ultimately, Mohammed bin Nayef more Speaker 1 (11:20) or less disappears. There was this kind of staged, kind of ridiculous moment where Mohammed bin Nayef kind of happily hands the reins of power to MBS. But then he kind of disappears. And he's been under house arrest for years. And it's a mess. And it's ugly. I'm not sure if MBN has been seen. I think he's still thought to be alive. But a pretty ugly moment there, but also potentially really dangerous. But basically what you had was Jared essentially backing what Speaker 4 (11:52) amounted to a coup d'etat. Speaker 6 (11:53) And Kushner's spokesperson denies this. But then something else happens. So that spring, Jared Kushner's father asked Qatar's sovereign wealth fund to invest. In a building in Manhattan, the family was at the time struggling to hold on to this building. Qatar said no. Then two months later, Saudi Arabia blockaded Qatar. And a former official tells you that Jared Kushner knew about the blockade and acquiesced. And his spokesman denies this. What connection, if any, were you able to