There are coincidences, there are coincidences, and there are times when that word just doesn’t seem to apply.
The Securities and Exchange Commission late last year dropped its inquiry into a financial company that a month earlier had given White House adviser Jared Kushner’s family real estate firm a $180 million loan.
That company would be Apollo Global Management, the decidedly non-infrastructure company whose CEO made several visits to the White House to supposedly talk about infrastructure with both Trump and Kushner.
While there’s no evidence that Kushner or any other Trump administration official had a role in the agency’s decision to drop the inquiry into Apollo Global Management, the timing has once again raised potential conflict-of-interest questions about Kushner’s family business and his role as an adviser to his father-in-law, President Donald Trump.
Kushner is sitting in the White House with his hand out to Chinese investors, his sister using his position to sell US citizenship at $500,000 a pop, and an FBI file so riddled with risk that no one could come up with an excuse to give him security clearance. And now it certainly appears that he’s also using his White House office to negotiate deals that give his imploding family business the dollars to go on a little longer.
A quick refresher on how Kushner Companies came to be in such a mess …
Kushner bought 666 Fifth Avenue shortly after taking over the family company. His father had just gone to prison for federal tax evasion, illegal campaign donations and witness tampering.
Like father, like son.
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Having just moved into the driver’s seat, Kushner decided to reshape his company by selling off scads of smaller buildings and buying the nation’s most expensive piece of real estate. Except the only way to make the $1.8 billion deal work, was to actually destroy that huge building and replace it with something truly Brobdingnagian. To that end, Kusher’s next step in taking over this massive structure and its massive debt was to try to drive out his own tenants.
After a 2011 refinancing, Kushner and his company devised a redevelopment plan that would double the building’s size, and they began trying to empty the tower, which further hurt revenue.
The result of such fantastic planning as “empty the building first, find the money later” means that Jared’s white elephant is more than a third empty. Not only is he in deep for the loan, the building itself is bleeding money while offices sit empty.
And who has Kushner talked to in his efforts to find the cash to bail him out of this tight spot?
Kushner met in December 2016, while he was working with the Trump transition team, with officials of Anbang, a Chinese insurance company.
And
Kushner, or representatives of his family firm, also met with a Qatari investment company, run by the country’s former prime minister and finance minister, Hamad Bin Jasim al-Thani, one of the world’s wealthiest men.
And
Jared Kushner also met on Dec. 13, 2016, with Russian banker Sergey Gorkov, who heads a state-affiliated bank known as VEB, for Vnesheconombank.
So far at least, none of them seems all that interested in throwing Jared a lifeline. Of course, if any of them were subject to an SEC investigation, or maybe needed the US to step back from some little province or island we had been protecting, maybe that would change.
“I suppose the best case for Kushner is that this looks absolutely terrible,” said Rob Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Without presuming that there is any kind of quid pro quo … there are a lot of ways that the fact of Apollo’s engagement with Kushner and the Kushner businesses in a public and private context might cast a shadow over what the SEC is doing and influence consciously or unconsciously how the agency acted.”
