Donald Trump may be making good money using his hotels and clubs as unofficial lobbyist-welcoming offshoots of the presidency, but White House aide and glaring national security risk Jared Kushner hasn’t been so lucky. He’s getting deeper in the hole.
Jared Kushner, a White House aide and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, appears to have drawn more money out of three separate lines of credit in the months after he joined the White House last year, a newly released document shows. […]
The changes take Kushner and Trump’s reported debts to a range of approximately $31 million to $155 million from the previously reported range of between about $19 million and $98 million.
This includes, just as an aside, over $50,000 in debt on a Visa card. That’s right, kids, Jared and Ivanka owe more on one credit card statement then you’ll make in a year.
Other than that, all we know is that the pair has taken on considerable new debt, from Bank of America, New York Community Bank, and Signature Bank, since joining the White House as (albeit ambiguous) advisers. Kushner’s real estate empire has long been rumored to be in precarious condition due primarily to a single purchased building, the white elephant of 666 Fifth Avenue.
As everyone, everywhere has noted, Jared Kushner is operating in the White House without a permanent security clearance. While Team Trump has tried to pass this off, along with dozens of other missing clearances, as a product of slow government work, experts have said it is extraordinarily unusual for the vetting of these top, highest-profile-in-the-nation positions to still be going on a year after they were initiated; it is far more likely that Kushner and the others failed those required background checks for as-of-yet unknown reasons but that the vetting process is being officially held open, perhaps indefinitely, in an effort to dodge those final decisions.
We do not know precisely why Kushner has no such permanent clearance. We only know that he has quite a bit of debt; that he is, like Trump, professionally embedded in a real estate crowd in which money laundering and other sketchy behavior is apparently rampant; that he was a part of a Trump Tower meeting held so that individuals dispatched by the Russian government could offer assistance to his father-in-law’s campaign effort; that Kushner has come under particular scrutiny by federal investigators operating under special counsel Robert Mueller; that investigators are probing a new Deutsche Bank loan to Kushner granted only a month before the 2016 elections—in other words, Rich Person Stuff.
But now he’s in a bit more debt than he was even before this mess started, which is a wee bit odd. Perhaps someday we’ll learn how all these pieces fit together.