Jared Kushner

Personal details
Born Name: Jared Corey Kushner
Date of Birth: January 10, 1981
Place of Birth: Livingston, New Jersey, United States
Political party: Republican (2018–present)
Other political affiliations: Democratic (until 2009), Independent (2009–2018)
Height: 1.91 m
Spouse(s): Ivanka Trump (m. 2009)
Children: Arabella Rose Kushner, Joseph Frederick Kushner, Theodore James Kushner
Parents: Charles Kushner, Seryl Kushner
Relatives: Donald Trump (father-in-law)
Joseph Berkowitz (grandfather)
Joshua Kushner (brother)
Murray Kushner (uncle)
Marc Kushner (cousin)
Education: Harvard University (AB)
New York University (JD, MBA)
Awards: Order of the Aztec Eagle (2018)
Jared Corey Kushner (born January 10, 1981) is an American investor, real-estate developer, and newspaper publisher who is currently senior advisor to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, the president of the United States. Kushner is the elder son of the former real-estate developer Charles Kushner, the son of Jewish immigrants from the USSR, and is married to Ivanka Trump, President Trump's daughter and fellow advisor. As a result of his father's conviction and incarceration for fraud, he took over management of his father's real estate company Kushner Companies, which launched his business career. He later also bought Observer Media, publisher of the New York Observer. He is the co-founder and part owner of Cadre, an online real-estate investment platform.

During the 2016 Trump presidential campaign, Kushner helped develop and run Trump's digital media strategy. On January 9, 2017, he was named as a senior White House advisor. As senior White House advisor, Kushner stirred controversy for his conflicts of interest, as he continued to engage in business, even profiting on policy proposals that he himself pushed for within the administration. Kushner was unable to obtain Top Secret Security clearance until May 2018, when Trump reportedly intervened on his son-in-law's behalf.

As senior White House advisor, Kushner pushed strongly for the FIRST STEP Act, a criminal justice reform bill which Trump signed into law in 2018. Kushner authored a peace plan in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which was announced in January 2020, but which was seen as overwhelmingly favoring Israel. Kushner had an influential role within the Trump administration in its response to the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic, which included advising Trump in the first two months of the outbreak that the media was exaggerating the threat of the virus, and later on helping to draft an error-riddled Oval Office address about the crisis.

Early life (1981–2007)
Kushner was born in Livingston, New Jersey, to Seryl Kushner (née Stadtmauer) and Charles Kushner, a real-estate developer. His paternal grandparents, Reichel and Joseph Kushner, were Holocaust survivors who came to the U.S. in 1949 from Navahrudak, now in Belarus. Morris Stadtmauer was Jared's maternal grandfather.

Raised in a Modern Orthodox Jewish family, Kushner graduated from the Frisch School, a Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school, in 1999. He was an honors student and a member of the debate, hockey, and, basketball teams.

Kushner enrolled at Harvard University in 1999. According to journalist Daniel Golden, Kushner was accepted due to his father's donations and history with the school. He was elected into the Fly Club, supported the campus Chabad house, and bought and sold real estate in Somerville, Massachusetts, as a vice president of Somerville Building Associates (a division of Kushner Companies), returning a profit of $20 million by its dissolution in 2005. Kushner graduated from Harvard in 2003 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government.

Kushner graduated from New York University in 2007 with dual JD/MBA degrees. He interned at Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau's office, and at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

Business career (2006–2017)
Following his father's conviction for fraud in 2005 and subsequent incarceration, Jared Kushner took over the management of his father's real estate company. As of 2019, Kushner's net worth is estimated at about $800 million.

Real estate
Kushner was a real-estate investor, and increased Kushner Companies' presence in the New York City real-estate market.

Kushner Companies purchased the office building at 666 Fifth Avenue in 2007, for a then-record price of $1.8 billion, most of it borrowed. He assumed the role of CEO in 2008. Following the property crash that year, the cash flow generated by the property was insufficient to cover its debt service, and the Kushners were forced to sell the retail footage to Stanley Chera and bring in Vornado Realty Trust as a 50% equity partner in the ownership of the building. By that time, Kushner Companies had lost more than $90 million on its investment. He was the face of the deal but his father Charles Kushner pushed him to do the deal.

On August 18, 2014, Kushner acquired a three-building apartment portfolio in Middle River, Maryland, for $38 million with Aion Partners. In 2013–2014, he and his company acquired more than 11,000 units throughout New York, New Jersey, and the Baltimore area. In May 2015, he purchased 50.1% of the Times Square Building from Africa Israel Investments Ltd. for $295 million.

In 2014, Kushner, with his brother Joshua and Ryan Williams, co-founded Cadre (now RealCadre LLC), an online real-estate investment platform. His business partners included Goldman Sachs and billionaire George Soros, a top Democratic Party donor. In early 2015, Soros Fund Management financed the startup with a $250 million credit line. Kushner did not identify these business relationships in his January 2017 government financial-disclosure form.

Newspaper publishing
In 2006, Kushner purchased The New York Observer, a weekly New York City newspaper, for $10 million, using money he says he earned during his college years by closing deals on residential buildings in Somerville, Massachusetts, with family members providing the backing for his investments.

After purchasing the Observer, Kushner published it in tabloid format. Since then, he has been credited with increasing the Observer's online presence and expanding the Observer Media Group. With no substantial experience in journalism, Kushner could not establish a good relationship with the newspaper's veteran editor-in-chief, Peter W. Kaplan. "This guy doesn't know what he doesn't know", Kaplan remarked about Kushner, to colleagues, at the time. As a result of his differences with Kushner, Kaplan quit his position. Kaplan was followed by a series of short-lived successors until Kushner hired Elizabeth Spiers in 2011. It has been alleged that Kushner used Observer as propaganda against rivals in real estate. Spiers left the newspaper in 2012. In January 2013, Kushner hired a new editor-in-chief, Ken Kurson. Kurson had been a consultant to Republican political candidates in New Jersey.

According to Vanity Fair, under Kushner, the "Observer has lost virtually all of its cultural currency among New York's elite, but the paper is now profitable and reporting traffic growth ... [it] boasts 6 million unique visitors per month, up from 1.3 million in January 2013". In April 2016, the New York Observer became one of only a handful of newspapers to officially endorse United States presidential candidate Donald Trump in the Republican primary, but the paper ended the campaign period by choosing not to back any presidential candidate at all.

Kushner stepped down from his newspaper role in January 2017 to pursue a role in President Donald Trump's administration. He was replaced by his brother-in-law, Joseph Meyer.

Politics (2016–present)
Political background
Jared Kushner had been a lifelong Democrat prior to his father-in-law Donald Trump entering politics. He had donated over $10,000 to Democratic campaigns starting at the age of 11. In 2008 he donated to the campaign for Hillary Clinton and his newspaper the New York Observer endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain in the US presidential election. After expressing disappointment with Obama, however, he endorsed Republican U.S. presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012 via the New York Observer. In 2014 he continued to donate to Democratic groups, but he then continued his "ideological conversion" by joining his father-in-law Donald Trump's nascent US presidential campaign in the field of the Republican candidates in 2015. Kushner had no prior involvement in campaign politics or in government before Trump's campaign.

Presidential campaign
From the outset of the presidential campaign of his father-in-law Donald Trump, Kushner was the architect of Trump's digital, online, and social media campaigns, enlisting talent from Silicon Valley to run a 100-person social-media team dubbed "Project Alamo." Kushner, together with Paul Manafort and Brad Parscale, hired Steve Bannon's firm Cambridge Analytica to support the Trump campaign. Kushner has also helped as a speechwriter, and was tasked with working to establish a plan for Trump's White House transition team. He was for a time seen as Trump's de facto campaign manager, succeeding Corey Lewandowski, who was fired in part on Kushner's recommendation in June 2016. He had been intimately involved with campaign strategy, coordinating Trump's visit in late August to Mexico, and he is believed to be responsible for the choice of Mike Pence as Trump's running mate. Kushner's "sprawling digital fundraising database and social media campaign" has been described as "the locus of his father-in-law's presidential bid."

According to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt (who worked on technology for Hillary Clinton's campaign), Kushner's role in the 2016 election was its biggest surprise. Schmidt told Forbes, "Best I can tell, he actually ran the campaign and did it with essentially no resources." Federal Election Commission filings indicate the Trump campaign spent $343 million, about 59 percent as much as the Clinton campaign.

On July 5, 2016, Kushner wrote an open letter in the New York Observer addressing the controversy around a tweet from the Trump campaign containing allegedly anti-Semitic imagery. He was responding to his own paper's editorial by Dana Schwartz criticizing Kushner's involvement with the Trump campaign. In the letter, Kushner wrote, "In my opinion, accusations like 'racist' and 'anti-Semite' are being thrown around with a carelessness that risks rendering these words meaningless."

Presidential transition
During the presidential transition, Kushner was said to be his father-in-law's "confidant," and one of Donald Trump's closest advisors, even more so than Trump's four adult children. Trump was reported to have requested the top-secret security clearance for him to attend the presidential daily intelligence briefings as his staff-level companion, along with General Mike Flynn, who already had the clearance prior to his resignation.

Kushner was reportedly an influential factor behind the firing of New Jersey governor Chris Christie as head of the transition team, as well as the dismissal from the Donald Trump transition team of anyone connected to Christie. An anonymous source familiar with the transition told Politico, "Jared doesn't like Christie... He's always held [the prosecution of his father] against Christie." Kushner told Forbes that the reports that he was involved in Christie's dismissal were false: "Six months ago, Governor Christie and I decided this election was much bigger than any differences we may have had in the past, and we worked very well together... I was not behind pushing out him or his people."

Senior Advisor to the President
On January 9, 2017, Kushner was named Senior Advisor to the President (formally, "Assistant to the President and Senior Advisor"). He consequently resigned as CEO of Kushner Companies, and as publisher of the Observer. Kushner's appointment was questioned on the basis of a 1967 anti-nepotism law. On January 20, 2017, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating, "The President may appoint relatives to his immediate staff of advisors." Kushner was sworn in on January 22, 2017. Kushner operated on a temporary security clearance for more than a year, with access to classified information, until he was granted permanent access in May 2018. On February 27, 2018, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly downgraded Kushner's interim security clearance to "secret" status, along with other White House staffers working with interim security clearances. He worked in the White House based on an interim security clearance until May 2018, when he passed a comprehensive background investigation. The New York Times reported in February 2019 that in May 2018 Trump ordered Kelly to grant Kushner a top-secret clearance, which Kelly contemporaneously documented in an internal memo. Trump had asserted in January 2019 that he had no role in directing officials to grant Kushner the clearance. Kushner's office is physically the closest to the Oval Office.

Furthermore, after Donald Trump became President-elect, Kushner and his wife met with Japanese Prime Minister and other Japanese officials, while his wife was conducting a licensing deal between her namesake clothing brand and a Japanese government-owned company. His wife sat in on a meeting between her father, then-president-elect Donald Trump, and Japan's prime minister, Shinzō Abe.

In late March 2017, Kushner was also given the new role of leading the "White House Office of American Innovation", where Kushner reportedly has been focusing on improving governmental efforts with regard to Veterans Affairs, information-technology contracting, and the opioid crisis. Kushner was involved in the sale of $100+ billion of arms to Saudi Arabia, and during a meeting with Saudi officials at the White House, he called Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson to ask for a lower price on a radar system to detect ballistic missiles.

Kushner's business activities in China have drawn scrutiny for mixing government with business. Kushner's investments in real estate and financial services have also drawn controversy for conflicts of interest. In May, the Wall Street Journal reported that he had failed to disclose all required financial information in his security clearance applications, including that he owes $1 billion in loans. During 2017, Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump made $82 million in outside income at the same time that they served as senior White House advisors. In March 2020, the Associated Press reported that Kushner had sold stakes in a firm that had benefitted from the same Opportunity Zone tax breaks that Kushner pushed for as a senior White House advisor.

In a statement, Abbe Lowell, Kushner's lawyer, admitted that Kushner used private e-mail for official White House business. No classified or privileged information was used on this account. During the campaign for the 2016 presidential election, Trump repeatedly criticized his opponent Hillary Clinton for her personal e-mail usage in her role as Secretary of State.

In an HBO/Axios interview released in June 2019, Kushner denied that President Trump was a racist. When asked whether birther conspiracy theories about President Obama (which Trump pushed extensively for a number of years) were racist, Kushner did not answer, saying instead twice, "Look, I wasn’t really involved in that." In the interview, Kushner spoke of his own family's immigration history: "It's a great reminder of how great this country is." In the same interview, he defended the Trump administration's decision to drastically reduce the number of refugees accepted by the United States (the lowest level in 40 years).

FIRST STEP Act
Kushner was a strong supporter within the Trump administration for the bipartisan criminal justice reform bill Formerly Incarcerated Reenter Society Transformed Safely Transitioning Every Person Act (FIRST STEP ACT, H.R. 5682) which President Trump signed into law in December 2018.

Russia investigation
Kushner's contacts with Russian officials have come under scrutiny as part of the larger federal investigation into Russian interference in the election. Kushner has said he had four meetings with Russians during the 2016 campaign and presidential transition, and that none of those Russian contacts were improper.

In June 2016, an agent of Emin Agalarov reportedly offered Donald Trump Jr., Kushner's brother-in-law, compromising information on Hillary Clinton from the Russian government if he met with a lawyer connected to the Kremlin. A meeting took place on June 9, 2016, and included Kushner, Trump Jr., and Paul Manafort, who was then chairman of the presidential campaign, who met with Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower. According to Rinat Akhmetshin, who was also present at the meeting, Veselnitskaya claimed to have evidence of "violations of Russian law by a Democratic donor", and that the "Russian lawyer described her findings at the meeting and left a document about them with Trump Jr. and the others". The Democratic National Committee cyber attacks were revealed later that week.

Between April and November 2016, Kushner had two undisclosed phone calls with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak. (In May 2017, Kushner's attorney Jamie Gorelick told Reuters that Kushner had participated in "thousands of calls in this time period" and did not recall any with Kislyak.) In December 2016, Kushner met with Kislyak. That month, U.S. intelligence officials who were monitoring Kislyak reportedly overheard him relaying to Moscow a request from Kushner to establish a "secret and secure communications channel" with the Kremlin using Russian diplomatic facilities. Kislyak reportedly was "taken aback by the suggestion of allowing an American to use Russian communications gear at its embassy or consulate – a proposal that would have carried security risks for Moscow as well as the Trump team".

Also in December 2016, Kushner met with Sergey N. Gorkov, a trained Russian spy who then headed Vnesheconombank (VEB), a Russian state-owned bank. Former White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that Kushner met with Gorkov briefly as part of his role in the transition, and as a diplomatic conduit to the State Department. However, VEB has stated that Gorkov met with Kushner on a private matter concerning his family's real estate corporation, Kushner Companies, even though VEB has been under international sanctions since July 2014.

In July 2017, Kushner appeared before both the House and Senate intelligence committees in closed session as part of their investigations into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. He also released a public statement. In October 2017 the Senate Judiciary Committee requested numerous documents from Kushner. Kushner's attorneys gave the committee many documents on November 3, but the committee followed up on November 16 with a request for many additional documents it said had not been produced.

In early November 2017, Kushner was interviewed by investigators from Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office. Reportedly the interview focused on former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. On December 1, Flynn pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, as part of a plea bargain. Bloomberg reported that Kushner is most likely the "senior member of the Trump transition team," mentioned in Flynn's plea documents, who is said to have ordered Flynn to contact Russia.

Mueller is investigating meetings between Trump associates including Kushner and George Nader, an emissary representing the crown princes of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia. In August 2016, Nader offered help to the Trump presidential campaign. In December 2016, Nader attended a New York meeting between the United Arab Emirates officials and Kushner, Michael Flynn and Steve Bannon. Mueller is also investigating Kushner's possible ties to Qatar, Israel and China.

The transcript of Kushner's interview with FBI investigators was not publicly released in January 2020 as ordered by a federal judge, as the Justice Department stated it required a security review by an unnamed intelligence agency. The transcript was released on February 3, redacted nearly in its entirety.

Security clearances
On January 18, 2017, Kushner requested Top Secret security clearance, using "Standard Form 86 (SF86): Questionnaire for National Security Positions".

The request omitted dozens of pertinent contacts with foreign officials, including the meetings with Kislyak and Gorkov. Failure to disclose pertinent contacts can cause security clearances to be declined or revoked, and an intentional failure to disclose can result in imprisonment. Kushner's lawyers said that the omissions were "an oversight", and that "a member of [Kushner's] staff had prematurely hit the 'send' button" before the form was completed.

By July 2017, Kushner had resubmitted his SF86, this time disclosing contacts with foreign nationals. This was the first time that government officials were made aware of the June 2016 Trump campaign–Russian meeting and Kushner's role in it.

On September 15, 2017, Carl Kline, the director of the personnel security office within the Executive Office of President Trump, recorded Kushner as having an interim Top Secret/SCI security clearance. Kushner and his wife were among at least 48 officials granted interim clearance giving them access to sensitive compartmented information (SCI): detailed accounts of intelligence sources and methods.

In February 2018, all White House staff holding interim Top Secret/SCI security clearances, including Kushner, were downgraded to Secret clearances, and Trump said that he would not intervene to grant Kushner a permanent security clearance. That day, White House sources said that part of the reason Kushner had not yet been granted permanent security clearance was that he was under investigation by Mueller.

On May 23, 2018, Kushner received permanent Top Secret security clearance.

In January 2019, Trump told the New York Times that he had not intervened to grant Kushner's security clearances. On February 8, 2019, Kushner's wife Ivanka also denied that Trump had intervened to grant her or Kushner's security clearances. However, on February 28, 2019, CNN (citing three anonymous sources) and The New York Times (citing four anonymous sources) reported that Trump had intervened to order the granting of those clearances. Reportedly, this is the first time a U.S. President has intervened in such a way.

Middle East peace plan
Trump put Kushner in charge of brokering peace in Israeli–Palestinian conflict, despite the fact that Kushner has no foreign experience or experience in the Middle East. On August 24, 2017, Kushner traveled to Israel to talk to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (with whom Kushner has longstanding personal links and family ties, causing Palestinians to distrust him). He then traveled to Palestine to meet President Mahmoud Abbas in an attempt to restart a peace process in the Middle East.

Donald Trump formally unveiled a plan authored by Kushner in a White House press conference alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on January 28, 2020; Palestinian representatives were not invited. In an interview, Kushner said he had "been studying this now for three years", and that he had "read 25 books on it, I've spoken to every leader in the region, I've spoken to everyone who's been involved in this." The plan has been characterized as requiring too few concessions from the Israelis and imposing too harsh requirements on the Palestinians. Both the West Bank settlers' Yesha Council and the Palestinian leadership rejected the plan: the former because it envisaged a Palestinian state, the latter arguing it is too biased in favor of Israel.

Coronavirus outbreak
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, Kushner was one of many "power centers with their own fiefdoms" within the White House who sought to influence President Trump's actions. Early on during outbreak, Kushner advised Trump that the media was exaggerating the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak. Kushner helped write the Oval Office address that President Trump gave to the nation on 11 March 2020, along with Trump's far-right advisor Stephen Miller. The Washington Post wrote that the address that Kushner, who had "zero expertise in infectious diseases and little experience marshaling the full bureaucracy behind a cause", helped write was "widely panned". During the address, Trump inaccurately said "all travel from Europe" would be prohibited, and that the travel prohibitions would apply to goods. The speech caused markets to plunge, as White House aides had to clarify what the actual policy was. European leaders said they were blindsided by the address. The speech set off panic among Americans abroad who had to scramble to learn whether they could return back to the United States and under what circumstances; this created chaos at airports in Europe and the United States. In the address, Trump blamed Europeans and the Chinese for the virus, described the virus as a "foreign virus".

Kushner also helped put together a 13 March Rose Garden event where Trump falsely claimed that Google was "quickly developing" a website that could help test people for coronavirus. Trump also overstated a project intended to set up testing sites across parking lots across the United States, taking the state and federal health care workers who oversee the project by surprise.

The New York Times reported that one way that Kushner was seeking advice on how to deal with the coronavirus outbreak was to ask his brother's father-in-law, a physician, for recommendations. The physician then proceeded to crowdsource advice on a Facebook group for physicians.

On 30 March 2020, The Atlantic reported that a website that Trump had said would help Americans to diagnose themselves and direct them to a nearby coronavirus testing site in a 13 March press conference had been a project between the government and Oscar Health, a company that Kushner had ties with. Kushner's brother, Joshua, co-founded and owns Oscar Health, and Kushner himself was a partial owner of the firm before joining the White House. The website was quickly scrapped.

Personal life
Kushner has a younger brother, Joshua, and two sisters, Dara and Nicole. He married Ivanka Trump in a Jewish ceremony on October 25, 2009. They had met in 2005 through mutual friends. Kushner and his wife (who converted to Judaism in 2009) are Modern Orthodox Jews, keep a kosher home, and observe the Jewish Shabbat. They have three children, a daughter born in July 2011 and two sons born in October 2013 and March 2016. In 2017, federal disclosures suggested Kushner and his wife had assets worth at least $240 million, and as much as $740 million. They also have an art collection, estimated to be worth millions that was not mentioned in the financial disclosures initially, and enjoy visiting art studios. The United States Office of Government Ethics has said that the updated disclosures comply with the regulations and laws. When asked about his father-in-law President Donald Trump, Kushner told CNN's Van Jones: "He's a black swan. He's been a black swan all his life."