In his disclosure form filed earlier this year, Kushner didn’t identify Cadre as among his hundreds of assets. The Journal identified his Cadre stake through a review of securities and other filings as well as interviews with people familiar with the company and Kushner’s finances.
In their review of Kushner’s securities and other filings, the WSJ noted that Kushner’s Cadre involvement “means the senior White House official is currently a business partner of Goldman Sachs Group and billionaires including George Soros”.
Kushner has also not disclosed a number of loans “totaling at least $1 billion, from more than 20 lenders,” and Kushner “has also provided personal guarantees on more than $300 million of the debt”.
Cadre secured a $250 million line of credit from the family office of George Soros, a top Democratic donor. Soros’s family office is also an investor in Cadre. Kushner, who is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka, wasn’t open about his business dealings with Soros — a left-wing billionaire funding activists fiercely opposed to Trump.
Kushner’s lawyer said that his client was currently in the process of revising his disclosures. Kushner has retained more than 200 assets. Like his father-in-law, he has declined to put these assets in a blind trust, which ethics experts regard as the best way to avoid conflicts of interest.
Trevor Potter, a Republican former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, and other ethics experts said such investments typically need to be disclosed. “Anything that presents a potential for the conflict of interest should be disclosed so that the public and the press can monitor this,” Potter said.
Christian Lammert, a political science professor at the Free University of Berlin’s John F. Kennedy Institute, said that nepotism could have dire political consequences, after German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel noted that members of the Trump family “who have never been elected show up suddenly as official state representatives”.
Ivanka Trump, the US president’s daughter represented the US government at the Berlin summit “and that is in fact highly problematic,” Lammert told DW.
Lammert said Trump had filled his White House with relatives in a way that could lead to corruption. “Family members are set up in key positions without confirmation – positions that allow them to take influence while at the same time, they have implications for their private businesses,” Lammert said. He pointed out, for examples, that President Trump’s tax plan would be a massive benefit to him and his family and that Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, sit in on meetings with foreign politicians whose countries they do business with.
The Kushner companies also confirmed having a “long-standing relationship” with two major Israeli banks, Bank Hapoalim and Bank Leumi.
The Trump administration has inherited a Justice Department investigation into allegations that Bank Hapoalim helped American clients evade taxes. Bank Leumi also allegedly helped US customers evade taxes from 2002-2010, and reached a settlement with the Justice Department in 2014 to pay $400 million in penalties.
While Kushner’s role in Mideast diplomacy remains unclear, Trump has said his son-in-law will work to “broker a Middle East peace deal”. Trump observed of his son-in-law: “I mean, he knows it so well. He knows the region, knows the people, knows the players.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is so close with Kushner that he once slept in Kushner’s childhood bedroom, according to a New York Times profile of Kushner.
After barely three months in government and the ousting of Trump advisor Steve Bannon reportedly by Kushner, Sebastian Gorka might also be losing his job on the National Security Council. The counterterrorism adviser Gorka is being hounded for his alleged ties to “anti-Semitic groups” in Hungary.
