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Kushner, Inc.: Vicky Ward on How Jared and Ivanka’s Greed & Ambition Compromise U.S. Foreign Policy
STORY MARCH 21, 2019 

SNIPPET:

icky, welcome back to Democracy Now!

VICKY WARD: Thank you, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s begin there. I mean, it may sound a little odd to talk about the senior adviser to President Trump, Jared Kushner, and how he almost started a war in the Middle East, by asking you about a New York City skyscraper, a New York City building.

VICKY WARD: You’re exactly right, though, to make—

AMY GOODMAN: 666 Fifth Avenue.

VICKY WARD: You’re exactly right to make the connection. So, the Kushners have this albatross around them. In the book, I sort of think of 666 Fifth Avenue as like the Maltese Falcon. It’s just always there, and sort of all roads, when it comes to Jared’s policymaking, lead back to this money pit, this disastrous investment, where a loan of $1.4 billion is coming due in February of 2019, and no American lender will touch it with a 50-foot pole, which means the Kushners need foreign investment. You know, tricky when it’s a family business, and the son is now senior adviser to the president. The Qataris told the Kushners in the spring of 2017, when Jared was already in government—Charlie Kushner asked for over a billion dollars; they turned Charlie Kushner, Jared’s father, down.

So, bearing that in mind, Jared has a new best friend in the Middle East, who also has money: MBS, the future crown prince—he wasn’t crown prince yet—of Saudi Arabia. And these two form a bond that really alarms Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, and James Mattis, the secretary of defense, because Jared and MBS cut out all the national security officials who should be looped in onto their communications, cut out everyone in the State Department. You know, these are systems we’ve had in place to protect our security and our government for decades. And Rex Tillerson, who, you know, was very experienced in the region—

AMY GOODMAN: The former secretary of state.

VICKY WARD: The former secretary of state, but, before that, remember, he ran Exxon—knew a bit about MBS’s sort of brutal track record and was really concerned about this.

Jared sees an opportunity for money, for investment in MBS and for subsidizing his peace plan. So he pushes the president to make the United States’ first official visit overseas not to a country with shared democratic values, such as Britain or France, but to the united—sorry, to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where they have this summit that is supposed to be all about cooperation in the region. But 10 days later, or thereabouts, Rex Tillerson and James Mattis are at a conference in Australia. To their astonishment, they learn that, instead of cooperating, the Saudis have led a group of Middle Eastern countries to blockade Qatar, where America has an air base. That is our security in the region. They had no prior knowledge of this. Tillerson immediately knew that the green light—Saudis would never have done this without support from the White House—it came from Jared.

And what MBS wanted was to over—was he actually wanted to invade Qatar—it was worse than that—because he wanted the Qataris’ resources, which is why, when he eventually—actually, when he couldn’t get hold of those, that’s what actually then leads him to round up six of the seven ruling branches of the Saudi royal family later in November. You know, it’s all about money. Rex Tillerson said to Jared Kushner, “Jared, have you noticed that the only branch”—you know, there are seven ruling houses in Saudi Arabia—”the only branch that MBS has not rounded up is his own? Don’t you think it’s statistically unlikely that they’re not corrupt, too?” Jared didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to know, when Tillerson told him how dangerous this was. And actually, what Jared did was what MBS wanted him to do, which was fire Rex Tillerson.

But there’s an ironic twist to this tale. In the spring of 2018, MBS arrives in Washington, and the president asks him for $4 billion to help rebuilding Syria. And MBS says, “I don’t have that kind of money.” This atrocious war in Yemen has cost the Saudis a lot, and oil prices fell. Well, Trump and Jared listened. The Qataris then arrived in Washington. And, you know, strategically, they offered Trump and Jared—they said, “We’ve got plenty of money, for whatever you want to do. But you need to end the support of this blockade.”

So, what happens is that at exactly the sort of same time period, 666 Fifth Avenue, the Kushners’ troubled building, gets an extraordinary deal that makes absolutely no sense. A Canadian firm, whose second-largest investor is the Qatari Investment Authority, says it’s going to lease this building, that someone who’s been involved in it said would be worth—more valuable if it was just a pile of dirt. They’re going to pay $1.3 billion, 99-year lease, and they’re going to pay all that lease up front. I mean, this is a deal that stinks. So, I mean, it seems hard—and at the same time, the U.S. changes its policy towards the blockade on Qatar. I mean, Congress is now, quite rightly, investigating this.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I mean, that’s one of the incidents, one of the principal incidents, that you cite in the book as a conclusion, which, you know, might surprise people, which is that Jared and Ivanka are Trump’s greatest liability.

VICKY WARD: Yes.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I mean, it seems that there are a number of contenders for that position, not least Trump himself.

VICKY WARD: Yes, but I think, you know, Trump, as we’ve seen, particularly in this last week, to a much larger degree than Jared and Ivanka, is in plain sight. Right? He’s not holding back on anything, unfortunately. You know, all the inappropriate things that have come out his mouth or his Twitter feed in the last week illustrate that. Jared and Ivanka would never say those kind of things, which means, I think, that they’re more dangerous, in a way, because they’re in disguise. You know, what I just described to you, I think of as sort of diplomacy in the dark. I mean, the idea that Jared is running around doing all of this, and nobody knows anything about it, not even our State Department, not the National Security Council, I mean, that’s horrifying.

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