Corruption Foreign Policy

Kushner Received Big Loans After White House Meetings

Written by SK Ashby

It's definitely not good for Trump's son-in-law Jared Kusher that he's under investigation by New York state banking regulators, but it looks like he has even bigger problems.

The New York Times reported last night that Kushner's family businesses received extraordinarily large loans from investors after meeting with their respective CEOs at the White House.

Kushner also reportedly offered one of them a position in the White House.

Joshua Harris, a founder of Apollo Global Management, was advising Trump administration officials on infrastructure policy. During that period, he met on multiple occasions with Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, said three people familiar with the meetings. Among other things, the two men discussed a possible White House job for Mr. Harris.

The job never materialized, but in November, Apollo lent $184 million to Mr. Kushner’s family real estate firm, Kushner Companies. The loan was to refinance the mortgage on a Chicago skyscraper. [...]

An even larger loan came from Citigroup, which lent the firm and one of its partners $325 million to help finance a group of office buildings in Brooklyn.

That loan was made in the spring of 2017, shortly after Mr. Kushner met in the White House with Citigroup’s chief executive, Michael L. Corbat, according to people briefed on the meeting. The two men talked about financial and trade policy and did not discuss Mr. Kushner’s family business, one person said.

This would obviously be suspicious all its own, but the New York Times also reports that the loan Kushner recieved from Apollo Global Management was "triple the size" of their average property loans.

Moreover, one of Apollo's largest investors is the Qatar Investment Authority, the investment bank of the country of Qatar.

When has Qatar been in the news lately?

Let's take a trip down memory lane to the summer of 2017 when Bloomberg reported that Kushner tried and failed to secure a $500 million loan from Qatari businessmen before Trump supported the blockade.

A few months before President Donald Trump encouraged Saudi Arabia and others to blockade Qatar, the real estate business owned by the family of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, sought a substantial investment from one of the Gulf State country’s wealthiest and most politically influential figures, according to a spokesman for Kushner Cos. [...]

Financial negotiations between the Kushners and a politically powerful Qatari figure like Al Thani raise concerns about a possible conflict of interest because Jared Kushner is one of the president’s closest advisers.

If you believe smoke is an indication of fire then this must be the Towering Inferno.