Where Did All of Jared Kushner’s Investors Come From? Take a Guess

Jared Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, has invested nearly $1.2 billion since it was formed in 2021. Nearly all of that money has come from foreign sources, raising major ethical red flags.

According to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, 99 percent of Affinity’s investor funds have come from foreign sources, The New York Times reported Tuesday.

Affinity, which is worth $3 billion, has received investments from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, as well as corporate moguls like Terry Gou, who founded electronics giant Foxconn.

These are all countries that Kushner worked with when his father-in-law, Donald Trump, was in the White House. Kushner served as Trump’s main envoy to the Middle East and was a key figure in brokering the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, and Israel and Bahrain.

Kushner’s fund has invested in an Israeli car-leasing and financing company, an online real estate site based in Dubai, and an Abu Dhabi–supported fast food company that operates more than 1,000 restaurants in Brazil, the Times reported.

Kushner announced two of his biggest deals yet last month: a $500 million hotel and condominium complex in Serbia and two luxury developments in Albania. Neither of these deals could have happened without Kushner’s time working in the Trump administration, where he met the president of Serbia and the prime minister of Albania, who were directly involved in each respective deal.

During Trump’s presidential term, Kushner likely made hundreds of millions of dollars. Those earnings also were controversial, particularly due to his business deals with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar while meeting with them in his White House capacity.

Although Kushner specialized in the Middle East during Trump’s stint at the White House, he has come under fire for his stance on Palestine. Since Israel’s war in Gaza broke out, the Abraham Accords have been criticized for ignoring Palestinians.

Recently, Kushner told a Harvard University audience that he thought Gaza’s beach coastline was “very valuable,” essentially advocating for Israel ethnic cleansing the land to develop it. If he continues in this vein, he might have to deal with more direct protests, like the ones that crashed his awards ceremony at an Anti-Defamation League event last month.

Independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. still can’t make up his mind about the January 6 rioters.

On Monday, Kennedy appeared to backtrack on a correction his campaign issued just last week. Appearing on NewsNation, the 70-year-old claimed that his campaign had made “a couple of mistakes” in issuing the revised statement.

“I think it was a protest that turned into a riot,” Kennedy told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo. “I think there were people who wanted insurrection and—but I don’t know what your definition of an insurrection is. If your definition is armed men who are intending to take over the United States government, it wasn’t that.

“I think that there were people who were there who wanted to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to another. I would say it was a very traumatic day in our nation’s history and people committed criminal acts. Those people deserve to be in jail,” he continued.

Last week, Kennedy’s campaign released a fundraising email that described January 6 rioters as “activists.” The campaign apologized for the error the following day but doubled down on the idea that the event didn’t amount to a “true insurrection” since the rioters didn’t wield weapons.

No matter which definition you accept, Kennedy’s defense of the rioters—who chanted “Kill them all” while hunting down former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Mike Pence—is inaccurate, even from a cursory review of footage from the day. The rioters who ransacked their way through the halls of Congress did indeed wield weapons, including baseball bats, hockey sticks, fence rebar, flagpoles, pepper spray, and bear spray, U.S. Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell told CNN in 2021.

The rioters also attacked Capitol Police officers with firearms, knives, stolen police shields, stun guns, fire extinguishers, and even hand-to-hand combat, which sent more than a dozen officers to the hospital.

But Kennedy’s verbal appeal to the mob isn’t the only way he’s thrown his support behind them. The independent political candidate has also suggested that the legal prosecution of the people who ransacked Congress was tantamount to “harsh treatment,” which he would be willing to investigate by way of special counsel if elected president.

Ted Cruz’s podcast may be crossing some major lines.

The Campaign Legal Center, or CLC, a nonprofit organization, filed a complaint against the Texas senator on Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission. The watchdog group argues that the Verdict With Ted Cruz podcast can’t send its profits to a super PAC that supports Cruz’s campaign.

Cruz’s podcast, produced with iHeartMedia, generates hundreds of thousands of dollars, and may be a lucrative loophole in campaign finance law since he’s making the money himself. But, as The Daily Beast found, it raises a number of legal and ethical issues.

For one, campaign finance records show that at least seven lobbyists registered to represent iHeartMedia’s interests have donated tens of thousands of dollars to Cruz’s campaign since the podcast launched in 2022, The Daily Beast reports. Cruz and iHeartMedia claim that he doesn’t get paid for the podcast, volunteering his time instead, so the money is reported as “digital revenue” from ads on the podcast.

The CLC also filed a complaint over the podcast in 2022, claiming that Cruz accepting podcast production services from iHeartMedia violated a federal law that bars senators from receiving gifts from registered lobbyists. But Cruz has escaped any legal action or penalties since then.

Campaign finance law prohibits coordination between candidates—who are limited by how much money they can raise—and super PACs, which don’t have any limits on how much they can raise and spend from individuals and corporations. A candidate can’t raise any corporate money, let alone hundreds of thousands of dollars of it, to go into a super PAC.

And there’s no secret why Cruz is looking for every dollar he can get: He has a tough competitor for his Senate seat in Colin Allred, a Democratic representative and former NFL player and civil rights lawyer. After Allred won the Democratic Senate primary, Cruz was spooked so much that he begged for campaign donations in a Fox News interview.

Cruz already had a reputation for challenging campaign finance law, even without his ethically questionable podcast. It looks like he’ll keep trying to raise money however he can, and worry about the ethics later.

House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer’s latest potential book deal about the impeachment effort into President Joe Biden might actually put him in the crosshairs of an ethics investigation.

In a letter sent Tuesday to the Office of Congressional Ethics, the watchdog group Congressional Integrity Project requested a probe into Comer’s deal, citing House Rule 25 as the basis for their request. The group noted that “members may not ‘receive copyright royalties under a contract … unless that contract is first approved by the Standards Committee.’”

“As Representative Comer continues to hold hearings and attempts to build the case to impeach President Biden, the American people deserve to know the extent to which he is benefiting financially. It is clear already that he has a political motive to impeach the President and it should be revealed if he has a financial motive as well,” the letter stated.

Comer has already admitted that the impeachment was a dud. Last month, the Oversight chair confessed that criminal referrals were the most accountability that his meritless, wayward impeachment probe was going to achieve. That is, of course, a far cry from the investigation’s original goal, which was to remove Biden from office.

But the floundering impeachment effort—which was predominantly founded on a web of lies reportedly manufactured by top Russian intelligence officials—won’t rain on Comer’s parade. Instead, the Kentucky Republican appears to be attempting to turn the saga into a book deal. Last month, a placeholder image appeared on HarperCollins’s website featuring a book by Comer titled All the President’s Money, with an expected publication date of September 10. Comer has since disavowed the posting but didn’t reject that a deal is on the table.

“The link was put up in error by Harper Collins,” Comer spokesman Austin Hacker told Axios. “It was not authorized by Congressman Comer and he immediately requested it be taken down.”

“Although he has been in discussions with Harper Collins about a potential book, he has not entered into a publishing agreement with any publisher including Harper Collins,” Hacker added.

But the Congressional Integrity Project isn’t convinced that it’s a clean deal.

“From the beginning, this impeachment investigation was nothing but a political stunt and a desperate call for attention from James Comer—and this potential book deal further proves it,”  said the organization’s executive director, Kyle Herrig, in a statement.

“Comer and his fellow MAGA House Republicans have spent the last 15 months investigating the President and have not discovered a single shred of evidence of wrongdoing. The American people deserve to know where Comer’s true priorities lie—with doing Donald Trump’s bidding and making a quick buck with a book or with the important issues like health care and the cost of living that are affecting Americans across the country.”

If Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, will he leave office gracefully at the end of his second term? Fox News host Jesse Watters seems to think so, despite Trump’s track record.

“Everybody knows Trump’s going to leave office just like he did the last time,” Watters said on the network Monday night, comparing the attitudes of Democrats who worry about Trump’s autocratic tendencies to people who get scared about the sun disappearing permanently after an eclipse.

Does Watters remember what happened after the 2020 election? If Trump will leave office “just like he did the last time,” does that mean he’ll refuse to concede his time is up, threaten violence, and then foment an insurrection? Does Watters realize that from now on, transitions of power in the United States carry a fear of violence, something that was once unthinkable?

And that’s not even getting into the election denialism that has now become pervasive in the Republican Party, which began with the “Stop the Steal” movement. All of this has led to the very credible fear of bad things happening after the election this November and in future years, no matter how the results go.

We got a hint of what would happen in 2020 when, in 2016, Trump said he would accept the election results “if I win.” And now, Watters and the rest of Fox News are trying to have the public forget about who Trump is and how he handles elections, perhaps because they plan to help him as November draws closer. And of course, if reality clashes with Watters and Fox News, they will blame the left, just like last time.