Jared Kushner’s Corruption Is a National Security Disaster

The president’s son-in-law dragged America into a war because he only serves his conflicted interests

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Jared Kushner, arched with the swagger of the world’s most confident mediocre white man, walked into the most sensitive nuclear negotiation of the decade on behalf of the United States — representing governments that had paid him $157 million — carrying a pager given to him by the intelligence service of the country that wanted war most, without a single technical expert, and delivered a conflict so catastrophic and convenient that it is impossible to explain as an accident.

I probably spent too many hours helping Marcy Wheeler document the actual story of what foreign money buying access to American power looks like. Her Ball of Thread series tells the story of the attack on America’s democracy beginning before Russia’s attacks on our 2016 elections. We showed what it looks like when it’s real and when it’s manufactured.

The Hunter Biden story was mostly made up. Kushner’s corruption is so thorough and vast that America hasn’t even begun to reckon with what a disaster it is for everything this country once aimed to stand for.

Where’s Hunter?

Listen. There was a moral case against Hunter Biden. A man writhing in massive grief and addiction — after suffering losses that are painful for even a stranger to recollect — took cash from foreign baddies while his father held the second-highest office in the country. The ethics were as bad as the optics. The case was investigated beyond propriety as Republicans tried to abet a likely Russian spy trying to frame the Bidens. And two Republican-led Senate committees investigated the central claim — that Biden policy bent to protect his son’s position at Burisma — and concluded the answer was no. Joe Biden pushed to fire a Ukrainian prosecutor whom the IMF, the EU, the State Department, and Senate Republicans all demanded be fired. If Burisma was buying the Bidens’ protection, it should ask for a refund.

Now consider what the actual corruption laced with nepotism as a national security threat looks like.

Jared’s corruption can be seen from space

It’s corruption performed at such cartoon levels of compromise and treachery that it’s become something people just take for granted. I guess that’s easier than facing the horrific implications of this kind of moral rot at the heart of the American presidency that has now delivered what looks more and more every day like one of the greatest geopolitical miseries of the century.

Jared Kushner incorporated Affinity Partners the day after Trump left office in January 2021. Six months later, he secured a $2 billion investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund — the same government he’d spent four years negotiating with on America’s behalf. The Saudi screening panel objected: Affinity’s management was “inexperienced,” its operations “unsatisfactory in all aspects,” and the proposed fees “excessive.” MBS overruled them. The panel’s own documents explained why the investment made sense anyway — to form a “strategic relationship” with Affinity’s founder. Not the fund. By 2024, THE FOUNDER had collected $157 million in management fees from foreign governments — $87 million from Saudi Arabia alone — while generating zero return on investment for any of his clients. Then he came back to negotiate on “America’s behalf.”

The entire architecture exists for one purpose: to reach Donald Trump, and every government that has paid him knows it. Legal scholars have noted that this arrangement — a private citizen collecting nine figures from foreign governments, then returning to conduct American diplomacy with those same governments — is precisely what the Foreign Agents Registration Act was written to prevent.

Kushner was never required to register. He was handed a title instead.

Endless patience for Putin, but can’t wait a weekend for Iran

After months of letting Putin make a mockery of negotiations with Ukraine, Kushner and Witkoff sat down with Iranian negotiators in Geneva in February. They gave away the game by choosing not to bring nuclear technical experts. Witkoff expressed surprise that Iran produces centrifuges — it has for decades — called Iran’s IR-6 enrichment device “probably the most advanced centrifuge in the world” (it isn’t), and referred to Natanz, Fordow, and Esfahan as “industrial reactors” (they are enrichment facilities, not reactors, one can learn by Googling). One of the most clownish moments in the history of diplomacy came when Witkoff put on his red nose and suggested that the Tehran Research Reactor — a facility the United States itself built for Iran in 1967 — was a secret weapons site.

Third parties present say Witkoff then badly misread the Iranians’ statement about their enriched uranium stockpile: where they were saying all of it could go away in a deal, he heard a boast about having enough for eleven bombs. The Omani foreign minister flew to Washington to try to tell America that a breakthrough offer was on the table.

The bombs fell thirty-six hours later, to prevent a peace deal.

Kushner and Trump’s excuses for what they were going to do anyway

After the war began, Kushner and Witkoff made the case that war was the only option, which is true if your goal was always war.

Witkoff told Trump that Iran was “basically playing games” and that even an “Obama kind of deal” would take months. Trump himself confirmed at a press conference that Kushner was one of the handful of advisers who convinced him to launch the strikes — “Based on what Steve and Jared and Pete and others were telling me... I thought they were going to attack us.”

The intelligence community said Kushner was being dishonest. Trump administration officials told congressional staff in private briefings that US intelligence did not suggest Iran was preparing to launch a preemptive strike. Senator Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the intelligence committee: “I saw no evidence that Iran was on the verge of launching any kind of preemptive strike against the United States of America.”

Now, either Trump is just lying, totally possible, or he’s telling us that his son-in-law fed him a bigger lie than the monstrous deceptions that led us into the Iraq War and Trump’s attempted coup on January 6, 2021. It’s a lie that has already delivered a crisis that could last a decade or more, either because he didn’t want to put in the hard work to get to a deal that essentially rid Iran of weapons-grade nuclear materials or because war was always Kushner’s goal.

So the question is, which interests does Jared Kushner represent that ordered up this war, where obliteration is the only comprehensible objective?

The answer to who benefits is not complicated, unless you remember that America still exists.

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman made multiple private phone calls to Trump in February advocating a US attack on Iran. Saudi Arabia has paid Kushner at least $87 million in management fees since 2021. The UAE, which has also invested more than $200 million in Affinity, was also lobbying Trump behind the scenes to strike Iran. Netanyahu needed the war to stay out of court and in power. Putin needed the oil price shock. Every government that has paid Kushner got exactly what it paid for.

America got a closed strait, more than a dozen dead service members, and oil heading towards $200 a barrel.

Our Constitution still exists, and accountability is possible

But there is a ticking clock. Kushner’s appointment as Special Envoy for Peace on February 19 started a 30-day window for him to file a mandatory public financial disclosure. That deadline is March 21. While the clock runs, he is actively soliciting $5 billion in new investments from the same Gulf governments he is currently negotiating with on America’s behalf — the same governments whose calls to Trump preceded the war. In December 2024, Kushner told a podcaster that Affinity “doesn’t have to raise capital for the next four years.” He said that to avoid exactly this scrutiny. He’s raising capital anyway.

Who didn’t need this war? You.

All of us will only be less safe, poorer, and more desperate as a result. In fact, this disaster looks to be supercharging a reordering of global powers that would only please those glad to see the end of American hegemony.

The countries disrupted by the Hormuz closure are not sitting still. They are accelerating the structural shift away from the dollar-denominated oil order that has guaranteed American power since Bretton Woods. Chinese firms have pledged $225–$250 billion to green manufacturing projects outside China — a sum that now surpasses the inflation-adjusted value of the entire Marshall Plan.

China’s capacity to produce solar modules, EV batteries, and electric vehicles already dwarfs its actual production, meaning the supply is ready the moment demand arrives. The Iran war is the demand signal. Every nation that decides the Strait of Hormuz is too dangerous, that dollar-priced oil is too volatile, that American military protection is too contingent on the whims of one man’s son-in-law — that nation is now in the market for an exit. Kushner’s patrons wanted a weakened Iran. They may have purchased the accelerated end of American hegemony instead.

Kushner didn’t misunderstand those negotiations by accident. He was the Saudi crown prince’s primary White House defender after the murder of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He carries a custom pager gifted to him by Netanyahu and senior Mossad officials. He fundraised massively from pro-Israel donors after Biden briefly paused bomb shipments to Gaza. He sat down to negotiate the most consequential diplomacy of the decade without a single nuclear expert in the room. The question isn’t whether his loyalties were divided. A man can’t divide what was never his to give.

His incentives are not that mysterious. What’s mysterious is how a movement that ran on America First delivered America last — and handed the bill to everyone who isn’t Jared Kushner.

The worst possible scenario

Hunter Biden’s foreign entanglements changed nothing. His father’s policy never bent. The worst version of Hunter Biden is a grief-wrecked man who traded on his father’s name while his father held no power to protect him, made money he probably didn’t earn, and paid taxes he definitely didn’t pay.

The worst version of Jared Kushner is a man who turned American diplomacy into a job where his only interests are his personal investment portfolio and autocrats who make up the last remaining constituency Trump cares about pleasing. And the most generous possible reading of his actions is that he is a world-historical “fool.”

Congress must demand immediate oversight. No Republican should be allowed near a mic without having to explain why Kushner’s singular interests have been elevated over the needs of every other American, except his liege.

If there were ever a “No Kings” moment, it’s this war, delivered to America by the boy prince of a wannabe despot elevated over all expertise and accountability.

Nepotism taxes the powerless. Sometimes those taxes are paid by watching an embarrassing relative flounder in an unfit position. Sometimes they are paid with a war that has killed at least 13 Americans, closed the Strait of Hormuz, and sent oil toward $200 a barrel.

America’s greatest innovation was rejecting aristocracy and qualifications by birth or coupling. Because the Founders, with all their failings, knew that royals are fools. Or maybe we have to believe they’re fools. Because if you pick at their intentions at all, their schemes are too dark for a decent mind to comprehend.

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