Jared Kushner May Finally Face the Music on His Shady Business Deals

Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Ron Wyden called Thursday for the United States to investigate Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner for possible violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

The Senate Finance Committee, which Wyden chairs, found that Kusher’s firm Affinity Partners had yet to return any profit to its foreign investors after receiving millions of dollars in fees from foreign governments, including as much as $87 million from Saudi Arabia. Now Wyden and Raskin are calling for Attorney General Merrick Garland to appoint a special counsel to investigate Kushner.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Kushner had chatted with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman several times since leaving the Trump White House, specifically discussing normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Kushner served as a top Middle East adviser during Trump’s time in office, and has floated his own wretched idea for what Israel ought to do with Gaza’s “waterfront property.”

Three sources close to Kushner told Reuters that if Trump were reelected, they expected Kushner to be involved in any Saudi talks in an unofficial capacity. Wyden and Raskin allege that Kushner has already set to work.

“While on the Saudi government’s payroll, Mr. Kushner is simultaneously serving as a political consultant to former President Trump and acting as a shadow diplomat and political advisor to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and other foreign principals,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Garland.

“Despite being engaged in plainly political activities, Mr. Kushner has not made FARA disclosures to DOJ related to the millions of dollars he receives annually by entities owned and controlled by the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar.

“The scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner coupled with the national security implications of his apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder are unprecedented and demand action from DOJ,” they added.

The letter alleged that Kushner’s extensive political activities require registration under FARA. This includes his work advising MBS and Trump, selling advisory and advocacy services through his private equity fund, aiding in fundraising efforts for Trump, arranging meetings with foreign dignitaries on U.S. soil, and influencing members of Congress on domestic and foreign policy.

After receiving a warning from the Justice Department, Elon Musk has stopped his $1 million giveaway to swing voters from his super PAC.

The tech CEO pledged Saturday to give away the hefty sum each day to one registered voter in a battleground state who signed America PAC’s pro–First and Second Amendment pledge. Every day since then, a winner has been announced: three Pennsylvania voters and one North Carolina voter.

However, the move immediately raised legal questions, as it’s a federal crime to pay someone to register to vote, punishable by a fine of $10,000, five years in prison, or both. Experts were divided, with Musk’s plan falling into a legal gray area at best. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro called the move “deeply concerning,” and author Stephen King accused Musk of “paying to register Republicans.”

Then the DOJ sent a warning letter to America PAC Wednesday, and there hasn’t been a giveaway since. Musk has also been uncharacteristically quiet on the subject. It would appear that the tech mogul has been scared straight by the federal government.

Musk is still engaging in political activity, even if he can’t make people millionaires. He met with conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch earlier this week to discuss the election, likely strategizing over how to get Donald Trump into the White House. He and Trump have coordinated to suppress negative stories about the Republican ticket on Musk’s X platform. Musk has also followed Trump’s lead, spreading debunked conspiracy theories as well as misinformation.

While he can’t skirt federal law, Musk has still been using his money for cynical political tactics, such as funding opposing ads to Arab American voters in Michigan and Jewish voters in Pennsylvania. But in the short term, it appears that the world’s richest man has learned that there are legal limits to how he can influence the election.

Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is treating his home state of Missouri like a flyover state, according to a new report that shows just how rarely the hawkish Republican lawmaker returns there.

Records of Hawley’s taxpayer-funded travels reviewed by St. Louis Magazine revealed that the Missouri Republican has traveled between Washington, D.C., and the Show-Me State only 33 times between March 2019 and January 2024—an average of six times per year.

Many of Hawley’s trips were short: Eight of them involved Hawley hightailing out of Missouri after less than 48 hours. More than half the time, Hawley was traveling home around the holidays, which tended to be longer stays. Hawley’s longest trip home was between April 1, 2020, and May 1, 2020, around the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

While taxpayer-funded trips provide an incomplete picture of Hawley’s travel, it is a relevant data point when considering his travel plans. It’s common for senators to expense travel between Washington and their home state, according to Democratic strategist Jacob Long, who spoke with St. Louis Magazine.

Lucas Kunce, a Democrat running to unseat Hawley, responded to the report Thursday in a post on X. Kunce wrote that Hawley “isn’t running for reelection to keep serving us—he’s running to keep up his luxury lifestyle on the coast.”

Hawley has previously attacked “coastal elites” and “liberal elites” as part of his political campaigns.

The senator and his family previously purchased a house in Virginia, which is now valued at $1.7 million. He previously listed his sister’s residence in Ozark, Missouri, as his voting address, but now has two properties associated with his name in Christian County, less than a mile apart, according to the Kansas City Star. The one he technically owns was only bought in 2023.

October has been a rough month for the self-described Christian nationalist. Earlier this month, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s editorial board endorsed Kunce, calling Hawley the “worst sitting senator in America right now,” and criticized him for pumping his fist in support of the rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Hawley also came under fire over his use of a private jet to campaign around Missouri, which was first reported by the Missouri Independent. Hawley had previously attacked his 2018 opponent, Democrat Claire McCaskill, for using a private jet, but apparently spent more than $132,000 on chartered flights between mid-December and June.

“Missouri’s flyover country for this guy,” said Kunce at the time, pointing out that he had been campaigning in a minivan with his wife and 16-month-old son.

Donald Trump has decided the most important issue of the election. It’s not the economy, immigration, or foreign policy—instead, it’s demonizing transgender people.

Since President Joe Biden stepped aside, Republicans have spent $120 million slamming Democrats in anti-trans attack ads, according to AdImpact data, with much of that spending coming in the past five weeks. However, polling out Thursday from Data For Progress shows that an overwhelming majority of all voters, or 80 percent, believe that candidates should spend less time talking about transgender issues. An astonishingly high 85 percent of Republican voters agree.

Nearly 3 in 4 voters, regardless of party affiliation, including 58 percent of Republicans, agreed that “transgender people deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.”

Moreover, most voters say they’d vote for a candidate who supports trans rights over one who does not. When messaging is introduced to explain two hypothetical candidates’ stances on trans issues related, 57 percent of voters chose the candidate “who says that the government should stay out of people’s private lives and that there is too much legislation targeting a small minority of the population.”

A plurality of Republicans (41 percent) and 58 percent of independent voters said they viewed Republican candidates using anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric in their campaigns as “sad and shameful,” compared to 38 percent percent of Republicans and 25 percent of independents who feel otherwise.

So why is it that Trump and his super PACs have spent $29 million over the past five weeks on TV ads attacking Kamala Harris over “transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison?”

That’s six times the amount that the Trump campaign has spent on ads discussing the economy over the same timeframe, making anti-trans ads the number one topic for TV-spending for the Republican candidate. As other October polling from Gallup shows, while there are many topics that voters see as important, transgender culture war issues are not one of them. Trump’s new focus on demonizing trans people—targeting transgender athletes and lying about gender-affirming surgeries—might just blow up in his face.

JD Vance has drawn the ire of labor activists, after crossing the picket line by publishing an opinion piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and defying a strike by the staff.

On Thursday, the newspaper published an article with Vance’s byline, titled “Kamala Harris’ prejudice against Catholics,” where the Republican vice presidential candidate criticized Harris for skipping the Al Smith charity dinner in New York last week, which benefits Catholic charities. Trump attended and made crass, profanity-laden remarks to a room full of Catholic priests.

The newspaper’s workers have been on a long strike since October 2022 with its owner, Block Communications. The National Labor Relations Board ruled last year that the company illegally imposed new working conditions that increased employees’ health care costs and reduced their vacation time. The employees are unionized under the NewsGuild-CWA. (The New Republic’s staff are also represented by the NewsGuild-CWA.)

“JD Vance has crossed a very obvious picket line by striking Americans,” Jon Schleuss, president of the NewsGuild-CWA, told HuffPost. “And JD Vance is a scab just like anybody else who crosses a picket line.”

Schleuss said that the picket line applies not only to journalists but also to contributors like Vance, even when they’re unpaid.

“You can deliver that message to any other publication,” Schleuss said. “Don’t go into work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, don’t click on the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, don’t share articles from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.”

The NewsGuild called out Vance on an X thread, including a graphic that spelled out SCAB in big letters over a picture of the Ohio senator.

One year ago, Vance visited the United Auto Workers picket line in Toledo, Ohio, attempting to demonstrate support for the automobile workers’ strike against General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and Stellantis. In reality, Vance was making a blatant political move while retaining policies that hurt autoworkers.

Despite making the occasional pro-worker statement, Vance has never done anything beneficial for labor unions or worker organizations. He had fake autoworkers in the audience at a campaign stop in Michigan earlier this month. A few years ago, he helped fund a startup that imposed poor working conditions on its employees, and when they left in droves, the company replaced them with migrant workers. Working people supporting Vance, or on the fence, should take note of the vice presidential candidate’s actions instead of his rhetoric.