Jared Kushner’s Mysterious Role in the Trump Administration

In 2021, shortly after he left his role as a senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner let it be known that he had loved his job but disliked the scrutiny and disclosure that came with being a top U.S. government official. He set up a private-equity firm and took a $2 billion investment from a Saudi fund led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. He proclaimed that he was embracing private life. “I’m an investor now,” Kushner said in a 2024 interview. If President Trump “calls you on November whatever and says, ‘I’d like you to come back to D.C.,’ you say, ‘Thanks, but I’m good’?” the interviewer, Dan Primack of Axios, pressed. “Yes,” Kushner responded.

But Kushner did come back. Two days before the United States and Israel attacked Iran this past February, he was in Geneva in a negotiation of the highest possible stakes. Over the weekend, he traveled with Vice President Vance to Islamabad to participate in failed peace talks with Iran. Without title or remit or any kind of official designation—only “presidential son-in-law”—Kushner has in the first 14 months of the second Trump administration sat down with world leaders including Vladimir Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, and Volodymyr Zelensky, along with Saudis and multiple other actors from the Middle East.

[Vivian Salama: The end of diplomacy]

Yet Kushner also did not come back. While carrying out public business for his father-in-law, he has continued to pursue his private interests and declined to disclose any information about them. There’s a carve-out designation in ethics laws known as the “special government employee,” which allows businesspeople to perform work for the government. Elon Musk was a special government employee, and so was Corey Lewandowski. But Kushner has not been designated one. He is both outside and inside government—a “volunteer,” the White House calls him. And he is vaulting over strictures that were put in place to defend the mechanisms of government from becoming tools of foreign or private interests.

Nobody’s pointed out any instances, Kushner told 60 Minutes last fall, where he’s “pursued any policies or done anything that have not been in the interest of America.” But it’s impossible to know, from the available shreds of information, where Kushner’s economic interests lie. He tried, for example, to raise $5 billion for his firm, Affinity Partners, in Davos, The New York Times reported, where he was also part of the official U.S. delegation presenting a plan for Gaza’s future. When I asked Affinity about this, it sent over a statement from its chief legal officer, Ian Brekke: “Affinity had early conversations with its anchor investor and does not intend to take in any additional capital while Jared is volunteering for the government. An SEC-registered investment firm, Affinity has abided by all laws and regulations and will continue to do so. Jared Kushner​ has complied with ​all applicable laws and​ requirements, and any ​suggestion ​otherwise​ is false.​ Jared has ​always operated ​in the best interests​ of ​the United States.”

In a wave of post-Watergate reforms, Congress passed the Ethics in Government Act in 1978, and soon set up the Office of Government Ethics to uphold the principle that the “American people could see the financial holdings of the most senior officials in the executive branch, and use this information to ensure those officials were free from conflicts of interest.”

But Kushner isn’t filing any ethics disclosures. Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, said in a statement that he “is acting in his capacity as a private citizen; therefore, he is not subject to disclosure requirements.” She added, “Mr. Kushner has been generous in lending his valuable expertise when asked. He does so in his capacity as a private citizen, and the entire administration appreciates his willingness to step away from his family and livelihood in order to help address these complex problems.”

Kushner may not have a title, but there is no question that he is a senior person in Trump’s hierarchy and is acting as a senior official would. He has traveled the globe with Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—who founded a cryptocurrency business with his two sons and the Trumps just weeks before the 2024 election, and who officially became a government employee last summer and filed a disclosure form that showed he still held shares in that crypto outfit, World Liberty Financial. (In February, the White House counsel told The Wall Street Journal that Witkoff had divested from World Liberty.)

This is leagues more transparent than Jared Kushner has been.

“Kushner’s role is no different than Witkoff’s,” Donald Sherman, the president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, told me. “So they should have to explain why he is being held to a different ethics standard than someone who has the same job.”

Ethics disclosures are highly imperfect. They are crowded with names of limited-liability companies that shroud officials’ business associates; different rules apply for publicly traded holdings and privately traded holdings; adult children are exempted from disclosure; the forms can run to excessive lengths. One Trump official filed an 1,878-page disclosure form, nearly nine times as long as the president’s 234-page form.

Yet Kushner has not filed even an imperfect form. He has dismissed the concept of conflicts as it applies to him and Witkoff. “What people call conflicts of interests, Steve and I call experience and trusted relationships that we have throughout the world,” Kushner told 60 Minutes after he and Witkoff negotiated the Gaza cease-fire. “If Steve and I didn’t have these deep relationships, the deal we were able to get done, that freed these hostages, would not have occurred.”

[Listen: How crypto is used for political corruption]

Kushner has a reputation for being a serious negotiator. And he has a direct line to the president. But his political dealings are ineluctably intertwined with his businesses. Kushner is related by marriage to the president, one who smiles on those who do business with his family, and the 2021 Saudi investment in Affinity Partners was made despite the Saudi fund’s own finding that the company’s operations were “unsatisfactory in all aspects.” Kushner has defended the deal, saying that the Saudi fund “is one of the most prestigious investors in the world.”

Trump is now on his fourth ethics chief. He has fired most of the presidentially appointed inspectors general and replaced them with loyalists, and the Department of Justice, which would ordinarily prosecute criminal conflicts of interest, is pliant to his will. Amid this wreckage in the ethics landscape, insisting on disclosure for Kushner may seem quaint, or at least not the top priority.

But the Framers of the Constitution believed that the threat of corruption—which they associated with European royalty—was as great as the threat of war. They believed that it was human nature to respond to financial interest, so their solution was to put in place structures to limit temptation and remove incentives to commit corrupt acts. It’s why they wrote into the Constitution the emoluments clause, which prohibits a president from taking a gift from a foreign leader without congressional approval.

“Against the insidious wiles of foreign influence,” George Washington wrote in his 1796 farewell address, “the jealousy of a free people ought to be constantly awake, since history and experience prove that foreign influence is one of the most baneful foes of republican government.”

Centuries into our democratic experiment, this is still true.