Jared Kushner

• Born: January 10, 1981
• Place of Birth: Livingston, New Jersey

Nationality: American

Education: Harvard University; New York University

Former Positions: Senior advisor to the president; head of the Office of American Innovation

Summary

Jared Kushner is the son-in-law of former US President Donald Trump and acted as one of his senior advisors at the beginning of his administration. His portfolio of duties included various wide-ranging and complex projects, such as leading efforts to negotiate peace in the Middle East, mediating discussions regarding criminal justice reform, modernizing the Department of Veterans Affairs, and helping to fight the opioid crisis. Kushner ran the newly created Office of American Innovation, which aimed to decrease government bureaucracy through the application of private-sector business models. Other projects Kushner worked on with the administration included trade agreements with Mexico and Canada and the COVID-19 response. Before becoming involved in the White House, he worked as a real-estate developer in the New York City area and as publisher of the New York Observer. Kushner’s past meetings and business dealings came under investigation in the fall of 2017 by Special Counsel Robert Mueller as part of his probe into Russia’s meddling with the 2016 presidential election. In 2019, he was referred to federal prosecutors for inconsistencies in his testimony. Though mostly resigned to private life and business after his time at the White House, Kushner and his wife, Ivanka, were subpoenaed by special counsel in 2023 to testify about the January 6 Capitol raid and the aftermath of the 2020 election.

Key Events

• 2006—Acquires the New York Observer for approximately $10 million
• 2007—Kushner Companies buys 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion, an unprecedented amount at the time.
• 2009—Marries Ivanka Trump
• 2015—Joins Trump presidential campaign, running digital strategy and social media
• January 2017—Named senior advisor to the president
• 2017—Past business dealings and campaign-related meetings come under FBI scrutiny.
• 2018—Plays a role in negotiating the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement
• 2020—Advocates for the administration's proposed Israel-Palestine plan for peace and is involved in efforts to normalize relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates
• 2022—Speaks to the U.S. House Select Committee on the January 6th attacks
• 2024 - Investigated by U.S. Senate Finance Committee for the relationship his company, Affinity Partners, had with foreign sources, including Saudi Arabia

Current Status

Kushner’s time at the top of the Washington power structure was marked by challenges, as he had to navigate Trump’s inconsistent policies, West Wing power struggles, and an improbably broad array of job duties. In January 2020, an official proposed peace plan regarding Israel and Palestine spearheaded by Kushner and based upon his subsequent years of study of and involvement with the issue was released. In October 2020, while much of his attention had been directed toward the Trump administration's controversial response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, he also had a major part in the talks that led to an agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates to normalize their diplomatic relations and had traveled to the Middle East as a lead member of a delegation to celebrate the finalizing of the deal as well as advocate for peace among other Arab nations. Kushner was traveling abroad during the January 6th attacks that marred the end of the Trump presidency. He and Ivanka moved with their children to the Miami area in Florida, and Kushner started a private equity investment firm, Affinity Partners. Despite Trump's run for re-election in 2024, Kushner was not involved in the campaign.

In-Depth Biography

Jared Corey Kushner was born on January 10, 1981, and raised in Livingston, New Jersey. His father, Charles Kushner, is a wealthy real-estate developer and prominent Democratic philanthropist. Kushner enrolled at Harvard University in 1999, despite having high school grades that many have characterized as mediocre. It later emerged that his father had donated $2.5 million to the Ivy League school in 1998.

After college—during which he bought and sold properties in Massachusetts as part of the family business, Kushner Companies—Kushner moved to New York City in 2003, where he would soon help expand the presence of the enterprise in Manhattan. In 2005, his father was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to several counts of tax evasion, witness tampering, and illegal campaign donations. He quickly assumed a leadership role to help the company in his father’s absence. In 2006, he bought the New York Observer, a newspaper popular among Manhattan’s power brokers and socialites, for $10 million. He served as publisher of the paper over the next decade, eventually ending the print edition in favor of an online-only presence.

In 2007, the same year Kushner graduated from New York University with degrees in both law and business, Kushner Companies bought an office building at 666 Fifth Avenue for a heavily leveraged $1.8 billion, which at that time was a record price. Continuing to exert his influence in various positions, Kushner officially assumed the role of chief executive officer of his family’s business in 2008. That year, the collapse of the real estate bubble forced Kushner Companies to sell off parts of the building and give up significant equity in subsequent years in an attempt to pay off debts. Nearly ten years later, the Kushner family still owed a large sum on the property, with the full amount due in 2019. In 2018, the company was able to largely pay back this debt when a leasing deal was reached with an asset management group.

In 2009, Kushner married Ivanka Trump, and in 2015, he joined the presidential campaign of her father, business mogul Donald Trump, where he would oversee digital strategy and social media. He guided the creation of Project Alamo, the Trump campaign’s massive proprietary voter database, and worked with Cambridge Analytica, a data-mining firm that targets voters based on their behavioral profiles. After Trump’s election, at which point many media outlets speculated that he had played a major role in helping the president-elect achieve victory, he was named a senior advisor to the president; at that point, he stepped down from his role as publisher of the Observer. By March, he had also been charged with running the newly created Office of American Innovation, meant to oversee a wide array of pressing and complex government issues using business strategies from the private sector, including the Middle East, federal information technology infrastructure, the opioid crisis, criminal justice reform, the Veterans Affairs department, and Chinese diplomacy.

In the fall of 2017, he continued to face an ongoing federal investigation into his possible involvement in the Trump campaign’s potential coordination with Russian operatives to help sway the 2016 election. According to some reports, he had been one of those encouraging Trump to fire former FBI director James Comey, and his meetings, including those with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, came under investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Only weeks later, it was announced that Kushner’s finances and business dealings were also being scrutinized as part of the investigation. He drew further criticism regarding his practices in the White House when it was revealed that he had used a private email account to correspond with other officials in the administration, information that he had not disclosed in his interview with the Senate intelligence committee. According to reports, he largely cooperated with the investigation, which ended with his referral to special prosecutors due to inconsistencies in his testimony.

Further controversy enveloped the announcement in 2018 that Kushner had, despite such investigations, been granted permanent top-security clearance; allegations had also been made that the president had exerted unprecedented influence in Kushner finally receiving this level of clearance. Expressing a desire to continue to do his job, Kushner was noted in 2018 for reportedly having an integral role in completing a renegotiated trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada to replace the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as well as the passage of a criminal justice reform bill. Late the following year, it was reported that he had been given the responsibility of overseeing the planned construction of the wall along the border with Mexico and had been brought into the United States' trade negotiations with China.

As the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the United States in 2020, Kushner became a senior advisor to President Trump on the administration’s pandemic policies. In the years following, Kushner has repeatedly defended many of the administration’s controversial statements and policies on the outbreak of the disease. Kushner did not participate in the January 6th attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential results as he was traveling for diplomatic reasons in the Middle East. He voluntarily spoke to the committee investigating the attacks. In 2021, after moving with his family to Florida, Kushner began a private equity investment fund and, in 2022, published a memoir, Breaking History: A White House Memoir.

Though Trump ran for president again in 2024, Kushner did not have a forward-facing presence on the campaign trail. He and Ivanka chose to focus on their firm and family life instead.

Associated Figures

Sergey Kislyak: Russian ambassador to the United States.

Robert Mueller: Former head of the FBI and special counsel appointed to investigate possible Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

Donald Trump: President of the United States.

Ivanka Trump: Businesswoman who is Kushner’s wife and daughter of President Trump.

Bibliography

Easley, J. (2017, April 4). Kushner becomes Trump’s jack-of-all-trades. The Hill. Retrieved from thehill.com/homenews/administration/327117-kushner-becomes-trumps-jack-of-all-trades

Fox, Emily Jane. “Inside Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner's Gilded Florida Paradise—Far From Donald Trump or 2024.” Vanity Fair, 17 Nov. 2022, www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/11/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-florida-2024. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.

Freedlander, D. (2017, May 25). Meet the real Jared Kushner. Politico. Retrieved from www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/05/25/jared-kushner-russia-fbi-donald-trump-215191

Garner, Dwight. “Jared Kushner's 'Breaking History' Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir.” The New York Times, 25 Aug. 2022, www.nytimes.com/2022/08/17/books/review-breaking-history-jared-kushner.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.

Horwitz, S., Zapotosky, M., & Entous, A. (2017, June 15). Special counsel is investigating Jared Kushner’s business dealings. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/special-counsel-is-investigating-jared-kushners-business-dealings/2017/06/15/5d9a32c6-51f2-11e7-91eb-9611861a988f‗story.html

Kushner, J. (2020, January 29). Jared Kushner: A pivotal moment in the Middle East. CNN. www.cnn.com/2020/01/29/opinions/jared-kushner-pivotal-moment-middle-east-peace-plan/index.html

Parker, A., & Rucker, P. (2017, March 26). Trump taps Kushner to lead a SWAT team to fix government with business ideas. The Washington Post. Retrieved from www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-taps-kushner-to-lead-a-swat-team-to-fix-government-with-business-ideas/2017/03/26/9714a8b6-1254-11e7-ada0-1489b735b3a3‗story.html

Schmidt, Michael S. “Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump Subpoenaed in Jan. 6 Investigation.” The New York Times, 22 Feb. 2023, www.nytimes.com/2023/02/22/us/politics/jared-kushner-ivanka-trump-jan-6.html. Accessed 26 Apr. 2023.

Tani, M. (2017, April 5). Here are all the duties Jared Kushner has in the Trump administration. Business Insider. Retrieved from www.businessinsider.com/what-does-jared-kushner-do-in-trump-administration-2017-4

Vigdor, Neil. “Jared Kushner Says He Would Not Join a Second Trump Administration.” The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/02/14/us/politics/jared-kushner-trump-administration.html. Accessed 24 June 2024.