[EVG file photo]
Details of Jared Kushner's real-estate empire were made public in documents released late Friday night, according to published reports. As Bloomberg reported, Kushner, the son-in-law and senior adviser to President Donald Trump, "held personal lines of credit of as much as $90 million to 10 financial institutions as of his Jan. 22 appointment to the White House."
The New York Times reports that Kushner resigned from more than 200 positions in the partnerships and limited liability companies that make up the family real-estate business, which has acquired $7 billion worth of commercial and residential property over the last decade.
The 54-page financial disclosure report shows, however, that "Kushner will remain a beneficiary of most of those same entities," worth at least hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Times on Saturday examined the "perilous legal and ethical ground" that Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, are on now.
Unlike Mr. Trump, who is exempt from conflict of interest laws, both Mr. Kushner and Ms. Trump — who took a formal White House position this past week — are forbidden under federal criminal and civic law to take any action that might benefit their particular financial holdings.
In 2013, the Kushner Companies started buying up some 40-plus buildings in the East Village. According to the Cooper Square Committee, only Steve Croman owns more residential buildings in the East Village than Kushner does. The properties are managed by Westminster Management, a division of Kushner Companies.
Meanwhile, Kushner will be keeping very busy. Last week, the President appointed him to lead the newly created White House Office of American Innovation. (Read the official White House memo on this here.)
Per The Washington Post:
Kushner’s ambitions for what the new office can achieve are grand. At least to start, the team plans to focus its attention on reimagining Veterans Affairs; modernizing the technology and data infrastructure of every federal department and agency; remodeling workforce-training programs; and developing “transformative projects” under the banner of Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan, such as providing broadband Internet service to every American.
Already on Kushner's to-do list: brokering a peace pact between Israel and the Palestinians.
One last note... Elizabeth Spiers has a piece in The Washington Post about her time working as editor-in-chief of The New York Observer under Kushner's ownership.
I inherited an office and a desktop computer, both in fine but used condition. The computer was a recent-model Mac, but when I turned it on, it was inexplicably running Windows. I summoned our beleaguered IT guy to explain, and he informed me that it had belonged to Kushner, who liked the design of Apple products but preferred the Windows OS.
“So he was basically using a $2,500 desktop as a monitor?” I asked. The IT guy shrugged.
In retrospect, this tiny moment seems like a metaphor. Frankensteining two products you appreciate into one product you appreciate even more isn’t irrational; it’s even creative, in a way. On the other hand, why did the newspaper’s owner need a $2,500 monitor? How was it anything but a vanity object?
