Kushner, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia: The Conflict-of-Interest Story Everyone’s Ignoring

If a Ukraine proposal was shaped to benefit a foreign power tied to Kushner’s money, that’s not diplomacy: it’s corruption…

I don’t know why this wasn’t above-the-fold news all across the country over the past few days as the details of the “peace plan” Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff took to Putin this week came out.

Kushner, it appears, had added in a provision that would have forced both Ukraine and Russia to take actions that would specifically benefit Saudi Arabia, a country that is paying the presidential son-in-law at least $25 million a year.

Can you imagine what the response would have been if George Marshall, while negotiating the 1948 Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe after WWII, had been personally taking millions from, say, Saudi Arabia, and thus inserted a provision ensuring that country could permanently benefit from the peace plan?

Given that then-President Truman and Marshall were Democrats, it’s safe to predict that the GOP would have melted down, but so would have the press. After all, the early-1920s Teapot Dome scandal — then one of the most infamous in US presidential history — only involved an oil company bribing the then-Secretary of the Interior with around $300,000.

The brutal kingdom of Saudi Arabia owns agricultural land in many far-flung places, from their alfalfa farms in Arizona to an investment in 400,000 acres in Western Ukraine devoted to growing grain for export. The only way to get that grain to the Black Sea where it can enter world markets is via barges down the Dnieper River, which cuts across Ukraine.

So, as Judd Legume points out over at Popular.Info:

“Point 23 of the peace plan that Kushner helped draft fulfills Saudi’s policy objective: ‘Russia will not prevent Ukraine from using the Dnieper River for commercial activities, and agreements will be reached on the free transport of grain across the Black Sea.’”

Which should have provoked a collective “What the hell?!??” across the planet and ring alarm bells in newsrooms from Tokyo to Topeka to Tallinn but has instead been largely met with a shrug.

“Of course,” politicians and the press seem to be saying, “it’s the Trump family. What did you expect?”

And, indeed, the corruption and self-dealing of the Trumps is breathtakingly world-class, run at a scale beyond anything ever seen in America.

— Remember when Jimmy Carter almost lost his peanut farm, his only major asset, because he’d put it in a blind trust and the guy he’d entrusted to run it screwed operations up badly leaving the Carters a million dollars in debt?

— Or when Saint Ronald Reagan put his small fortune — $700,000 ($2.7 million in today’s dollars) — in a blind trust and didn’t have a clue what was happening with it for the next 8 years?

— How about when the Bulgarian president gave President George W. Bush a puppy and the dog was sent to the National Archives before placement to ensure conformity with the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?

Presidents not taking and keeping gifts or money from foreign governments, in compliance with that Clause and associated federal anti-bribery laws, has a history that dates back to Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. But complying with any law has never been a strong suit for the Trump Crime Family.

Donald Trump tried to convince us in his first term that he was complying with the law by calling a press conference where we were treated to huge stacks of papers and manilla file folders supposedly representing his complex estate that he was handing off to his kids, but we soon learned it was entirely a scam: Trump was getting checks to sign every two weeks in the Oval Office, and all that paper and those folders were blank.

This second term he’s not even trying. He extracted millions of dollars from his suckers followers in exchange for his and his wife’s so-called digital coins (they’re just “collectible” digital images); the value of those “coins” has now fallen by 86% (Donald) and 99% (Melania) respectively. And don’t get me started on the so-called “Trump Phones” scam.

But those are chump change compared to the billions he’s accumulated in crypto, and the billions being thrown at Trump-branded/licensed properties being negotiated or built right now in over 20 countries including India, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Qatar, Vietnam, Serbia, Romania, Uruguay, and the Maldives.

Or the $400 million plane Qatar gave Trump, along with the billion-dollar Trump-branded resort they’re building for him, which were followed by the US giving that country — and only that country — an astonishing NATO-style security guarantee that our soldiers will shed their blood to defend that kingdom’s potentates.

So, it probably shouldn’t surprise us that Jared, after taking $2 billion from the Saudis along with his $25 million/year “fee,” would insert a paragraph into the Russia/Ukraine deal that would benefit the Saudi crown prince who’s been his top benefactor.

And, even more astonishing, that he is serving in this position without any legal authority in violation of federal law. As Judd Legum explains, if he’s a private individual it’s a felony crime for him to negotiate with a foreign government, and if he’s acting on behalf of our government he’s a “special government employee” and therefore subject to the Emoluments Clause.

Either way, what he’s doing is deeply illegal. As well as apparently deeply corrupt.

But where’s the press on this? And when will Democrats begin an investigation into it?

Inquiring minds want to know…

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Louise’s Daily Song: “A Peace Plan with a Price Tag”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink is now available in bookstores nationwide.
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