When he’s not practicing martial arts at the Cobra Kai dojo, Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner seems to be consistently engaging in questionable business dealings.
White House attorneys are looking into whether hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of loans secured by Kushner’s family violated laws or federal ethics regulations.
According to CNN, “The acting director of the Office of Government Ethics said in a letter to a Democratic member of Congress that the White House Counsel’s office is looking into whether Jared Kushner violated any laws when he met with business entities which later loaned more than $500 million to his company.”
The deals, revealed last month by the New York Times, included a $184 million loan from Apollo Global Management LLC and a $325 million loan from Citigroup Inc.
“I have discussed this matter with the White House Counsel’s Office in order to ensure that they have begun the process of ascertaining the facts necessary to determine whether any law or regulation has been violated,” David Apol, acting director of the Office of Government Ethics, wrote in a March 22 letter to Raja Krishnamoorthi, an Illinois Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Bloomberg reports. “During that discussion, the White House informed me that they had already begun this process.”
Executives with both Apollo and Citigroup met with Kushner at the White House but denied that there was any talk about the loans during those meetings.
Citigroup notes that the loan issued to Kushner Companies was for a Brooklyn, N.Y., real estate development and that “Chief Executive Officer Michael Corbat, who met with Kushner less than a month before the loan was secured, didn’t know about the transaction,” Bloomberg reports.
And this, folks, is what happens when you have a private citizen with major business dealings inside the White House. The Trumps know this, and you guessed it: They don’t care.