Jared Kushner never announced he was back in government. There was no press release and no swearing-in. He simply reappeared in the second Trump administration, flying around the world with Steve Witkoff, attempting diplomacy with Iran, with Russia and Ukraine and with Israel and Hamas, on behalf of the Trump White House with people who either had already invested with him or might in the future.
He never took a salary. But did this make him conflict free, as White House lawyers claimed?
As Dexter Filkins shows in his blockbuster New Yorker piece, “Jared Kushner’s Dollar Diplomacy,” absolutely not. In almost every region he’s supposed to be representing the United States, he has interests of his own.
Yet, until now most journalists have not bothered to probe Kushner’s conflicts in Trump’s second term. In our conversation, Filkins wonders aloud if it’s because Kushner gives journalists plenty of off-record access. If true, that is very troubling.
Here are some of the highlights from our conversation:
“A force field around these guys”
In the first Trump Administration, Filkins says reporting on Jared and Ivanka was, frankly, easy. The White House leaked constantly. He remembers that they “all but left the back door open.”
This time it is different. “I don’t think I’ve ever worked on anything so hard,” he told me. “I felt like there was a force field around these guys.”
Ignorance In The Iran Negotiations
His New Yorker piece opens with a scene on the eve of the war with Iran. Kushner and Witkoff are in Geneva with Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. According to someone in the room, the Iranians put real concessions on the table, including suspending uranium enrichment, which was unprecedented.
But according to someone briefed on the talks neither Kushner nor Witkoff understood what the Iranians were offering. There was no technical adviser in the room, according to Filkins’ source. (The White House denied this). Talks collapsed, and within hours we were at war.
Ironically the war with Iran and the chaos it has caused in the Middle East is exactly the opposite of what the Saudis, Emiratis and Qataris - the three larges investors in Kushner’s fund, Affinity - wanted.
Filkins: Somebody pointed out to me, somebody who’s very plugged in in the Middle East, an American, but he pointed out to me that, and I think this has been reported in other places, but that when Jared was negotiating in Geneva the deal with Iran, at the very same time, he was trying to raise money in the Middle East from the Gulf countries for his private equity fund. And so what this person said to me was, I think he was there to get paid. He was basically running around saying, not physically in the Middle East, but he was going around saying, like, I saved you from Iran. I took care of the Iranian problem. How about another billion?”
And no way to prove that. But of course, then you stand back and look at it and you’re like, well, that might have been true back in March, but it’s not true now. The war is a disaster by any measure. And the Iran problem hasn’t been taken care of at all.
And so it’s a really interesting question. How do those investors, the people that invested in Jared, You know, the Saudis are giving $3 billion. I think they’re up to now. The Emiratis, the Kuwaitis, how, sorry, the Qataris. How do they feel about that investment now?
Potential business interests with Russia
Filkins has a scoop to do with the negotiations around Russia’s war with Ukraine. He got hold of a raw European intelligence document that listed ten potential business deals in Russia for Americans, conditional on Moscow getting the Ukraine peace deal it wants. The names include Rick Grenell, Gentry Beach, Witkoff, the Trumps, and Jared Kushner. The White House said that the deals are “for the American people.”
Filkins says the document suggests something more personal.
However, he also says that there were people who told him that Kushner’s involvement in the Ukraine talks had been a positive.
Well, you know, when you do a story like this, you have to be willing to kind of, you know, you have to be willing to accept that not everything will add up perfectly. And so, and this is a great example. Ukraine’s a perfect example. So you have, on one hand, you have this intelligence document, which I reported, that basically said all the Trump guys are like trying to make deals with Putin on the side, business deals. And on the other hand, there were people who spoke to me about Jared and Ukraine and negotiations who said it’s just been a real positive that he’s involved.
A recorded phone call with MBS
Filkins unearthed another scoop here. While it was known that one of the big reasons the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman - who invested $2 billion in Kushner’s fund affinity, against the advice of his own advisors - felt he owed Kushner partly for effectively giving him a green light to exercise a palace coup and imprison his cousin Mohammed Bin Nayef and take his place as Crown Prince, it was not known that the phone call in which this happened was recorded.
I mean, for your listeners, I thought it’s a pretty amazing moment because you’ve got, you know, the monarchy in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is this incredibly important place sitting on this, you know, oceans of oil. It’s an authoritarian country. It’s very unstable. And the king, you know, the king is elderly and kind of faded out.
So the top job is really who’s going to be crown prince. And that’s basically, you just laid it out. Mohammed bin Nayef, who had been the crown prince, you know, MBS had his eyes on his job and was maneuvering and trying to stack it all up. But he checked in with Jared first.
I mean, that’s what he did. And the phone call was secretly recorded. And basically, Jared said, you know, you got the green light here. We don’t oppose this in the White House if you were to go for it. And he did. I mean, he went for it. He deposed his cousin.
Albania, barefoot
We get into Kushner’s controversial $4 billion real estate project in Albania: the one where Ivanka claimed they’d discovered it after swimming ashore off a yacht and climbing barefoot up an undeveloped Albanian hillside…
The project has stalled due to protests and obstacles on multiple fronts.
Filkins was lucky enough to go to Albania and meet with the colorful Prime Minister Edi Rama.
For all this and more, read the New Yorker article and watch or take a listen.
And see you next week!
Watch our full conversation on Substack.Thank you Jeanne Elbe, An Mcgreevy, Under the Golden Boot, Robert Jaffee, KC, and many others for tuning into my live video with dexter filkins! Join me for my next live video in the app.
