Four months earlier, Kushner was one of about fifty guests at Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding celebration on a private island in the Bahamas. ProPublica reported this week that a big share of the bill was paid by a Russian named Umar Kremlev. The island ran about $100,000 a night. The fireworks ran about $70,000.
Kremlev runs a boxing federation bankrolled by Gazprom, the Russian state gas company. Putin gave him the Order of Friendship. He was traveling with Putin in China days before the party.
So the man negotiating with Putin celebrated on the tab of Putin’s friend.
Kushner declined to comment. Don Jr. called it a generous gift from a friend. The President says he has “no idea who Umar is.”
That’s the Russia side. The Gulf side is bigger.
Dexter Filkins has a long piece in The New Yorker this week called “Jared Kushner’s Dollar Diplomacy.” It lays out what Kushner was doing while he negotiated with Iran on behalf of the United States earlier this year.
He was raising $5 billion for his private equity fund, Affinity Partners, from Middle Eastern sources — including Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
One source with ties to the region told Filkins: “My sense is that he thinks he was killing two birds with one stone—he was helping the Arabs defeat the Iranians, and he wanted to be paid for it.”
The negotiating itself was a mess. At the February talks in Geneva, Kushner and Steve Witkoff had no qualified technical experts at the table. The Department of Energy assigned a specialist to Witkoff. The specialist reportedly never made it into the room. When Iran’s foreign minister put concessions on the table, nobody on the American side could tell whether they were real or cosmetic.
A former White House official who worked on Iran’s nuclear program put it this way: “For them not to have technical advisers there is just total malpractice.”
Then came the war.
In December 2024, Kushner said he had “preemptively” raised $1.5 billion so that “we don’t have to raise capital for the next four years.”
That lasted about a year.
Affinity now manages about $6.1 billion. Roughly 99 percent of it comes from outside the United States — mostly Saudi, Emirati and Qatari money. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, put in the first $2 billion. Last month Affinity closed the $55 billion buyout of Electronic Arts, side by side with that same Saudi fund.
Congressional Democrats estimate Affinity collected about $157 million in fees from foreign investors between 2021 and 2024 — $87 million of it from Saudi Arabia — and more than $60 million more in 2025 alone.
And in January, the administration rolled out a Gaza “Board of Peace” where a country can buy a permanent seat for $1 billion. Kushner sits on its executive committee.
Virginia Canter is a veteran government ethics lawyer who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. Her read, in The New Yorker: “If Kushner wasn’t the son-in-law of the President, he would be under investigation by the F.B.I.”
He isn’t.
And the Congress that is supposed to watch him isn’t doing it either.
Posted by Previous_Basis_84
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Not saying it’s right, but Hunter Biden did the same stuff. I’m sure every president has a “son in law”.