Jared Kushner launched Affinity Partners in 2021 and quickly drew major funding from Gulf autocracies—including Saudi Arabia—after those investors demanded clarity and faced ethical alarms. Despite pushback from US lawmakers and national security officials, Ku
On the days Jared Kushner is supposed to be negotiating peace, he is also doing something else—raising and managing money tied to the very regimes whose interests he is meant to weigh, even as the US government’s alliances strain under the fallout.
The pitch that helped make it possible came in 2021 from a new investment fund called Affinity Partners. The would-be investors saw a deck of 20 black-and-white slides that looked. in the words of one source. like “something an undergraduate would have put together. ” verging on satire and stuffed with corporate slogans about “accelerating transformation through connectivity” and “aligned economic interests.” The details were sparse. but the opportunities were described as endless.
What wasn’t vague was the centerpiece of the package: at the end, taking up two full slides, was a 1,200-word biography of Affinity’s founder—Kushner.
Affinity aimed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from American investors and from the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia. The kingdom had already been investing widely in everything from sports—professional golf. tennis. and soccer leagues—to commercial real estate and luxury properties. plus video games and celebrity influencers. It had also backed PR agencies and consultancy firms, and even large corporate names such as Boeing, Citigroup, and Disney. Yet when Saudi officials conducted due diligence on Affinity, they found the operation “unsatisfactory in all aspects.”.
Saudi officials still said no—except for one factor: Kushner’s own Saudi connection.
The screening process turned on the final say of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. known for leading a regime that included the assassination of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. and known as an architect of a tightly controlled. repressive Saudi order. The officials rejected Affinity. citing its lack of clarity or strategy. the absence of other major investors. “inexperience” among its managers. and “public relations risks.” But when bin Salman overruled his experts. the money moved.
Affinity’s funding was approved—$2 billion at the start. with “potentially much more down the road.” In that decision. the prince saw more than an investment pitch. He saw a fund tied to another princeling he had already befriended—and. if American politics shifted. Kushner as an asset who could be steered.
By then. Kushner was out of the White House. where he had served as a top adviser to his father-in-law. Donald Trump. Trump. a disgraced former president back in Florida after losing to Joe Biden. was railing about election fraud as he planned a return to power. Kushner chose a different route: launching Affinity on the day after Biden was sworn in and turning proximity to wealth and political influence into a new career.
The investment proved fruitful, and Kushner’s role became harder to separate from the diplomatic agenda built around him. In the occupied Palestinian territories. he became point man for what was described as a “New Gaza” that would restore jobs. prosperity. and peace. He was dispatched to Moscow with special envoy Steve Witkoff to seek a diplomatic solution to Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine. In January. Kushner and Witkoff were appointed executive board members of Trump’s new Board of Peace. described as an attempt to monetize foreign relations. The following month. Trump named Kushner his “special envoy for peace. ” sending Kushner and Witkoff to lead the administration’s negotiations with Iran.
To each assignment, Kushner brought what critics describe as conflicts of interest—financial entanglements “spanning the globe” and centered on diplomatic hotspots where he was supposed to negotiate on America’s behalf. The pitch, in other words, didn’t stay in the conference room.
The scale of the arrangement was also described as unprecedented. One former Republican official. cited as saying in April 2024 that they could “recall no precedent” for a government official leaving office. starting an investment firm. and then immediately receiving billions of dollars from foreign governments with which the official had been working while still serving in government. It was also noted that this came before Trump placed Kushner—despite having “zero diplomatic or foreign affairs expertise until his father-in-law rose to power”—at the center of major international crises.
Even Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who led the charge against Hunter Biden, was alarmed. Comer said Kushner’s Saudi funding arrangements “crossed the line of ethics.” When a consultant close to Kushner called and asked him to tone down criticism. Comer said he instructed the intermediary “to tell Kushner to fuck off.”.
Kushner’s access to sensitive information also became part of the story. He was denied top-secret clearance until Trump overruled intelligence officials. A former White House official said: “There was a risk the Saudis were playing him.”
And it wasn’t only Saudi Arabia. The United Arab Emirates and Qatar were also said to have begun investing in Affinity around the same time as Saudi funding. To date. firms linked to the UAE and Qatar invested at least $1.5 billion in Kushner’s fund. and with more modest infusions from smaller—nearly all foreign—investors. Affinity’s pool of assets topped $6 billion. The fund generated more than $100 million in management fees for Kushner and his partners. Affinity’s fee structure, the Saudi investment officials wrote in their analysis, seemed “excessive.”.
Those money flows mattered not just for ethics, but for leverage. The contracts Affinity signed allowed investors to pull out after a five-year window. That meant Saudi Arabia and Qatar had the power to implode Affinity in the middle of Trump’s second term. putting Kushner’s financial standing—critics argue. his ability to influence and stay in the center of policy—under a looming threat.
When that arrangement became clearer, Democratic lawmakers finally pushed harder. But the fact remains that no formal investigations or high-level hearings into Kushner’s doings emerged during the Biden years. even after Trump announced in November 2022 that he would run again. Democrats appeared reluctant to spotlight family-member profiteering from connections to the White House while Hunter Biden was under investigation.
One of the first figures to press the issue publicly was Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, then-chair of the Senate Finance Committee. In June 2024 and again that September, he wrote to Affinity Partners seeking information. Affinity resisted, withholding key financial details and refusing to fully reveal its foreign investors.
Wyden’s questions centered on two unknowns: how much Kushner personally profited from foreign dealings and what he was doing precisely for those clients. A source familiar with the back-and-forth said Kushner “has some experience in real estate. but no experience running hedge funds and private equity.”.
In October 2024—less than two weeks before the election—Wyden and Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland. They accused Kushner of violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act and asked Garland to name a special counsel to investigate. Their letter said the “scale of these undisclosed foreign payments to Mr. Kushner” combined with the national security implications of Kushner’s “apparent ongoing efforts to sell political influence to the highest foreign bidder” was “unprecedented and demand action from DOJ.”.
Then the political calendar shifted. Garland was on the way out, Trump was incoming, and Republicans were poised to run Congress. The special counsel they sought did not materialize—while Affinity’s fundraising runway widened.
The case against Kushner’s role isn’t only about money. It also rests on how critics say he thinks about rules—less as guardrails and more as negotiable terms.
A theme appears in his own long history of dealmaking and influence. Kushner has said that he’s “just different being ‘deal guys’—just a different sport.” The pitch is intimate and self-justifying, and it’s echoed by older episodes where outsiders say the family’s rise depended on access.
Journalist Andrea Bernstein wrote in her 2020 book. American Oligarchs. that a $2.5 million donation from Charles Kushner to Harvard was structured to begin only “after Jared matriculated.” In March 2005. less than two years after Jared graduated from Harvard. Charles Kushner was sentenced to 24 months in prison and served 14 after pleading guilty to 18 counts of tax evasion. illegal campaign contributions. and witness tampering. The court record also included hiring a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law. filming the tryst. and sending the tape to his sister. Trump later pardoned Charles in December 2020 and appointed him ambassador to France four years later.
Kushner’s own rise has come alongside accounts of influence meant to punish or silence. At age 25. he purchased a majority stake in the New York Observer for $10 million. asserting the money came from real estate deals he’d closed during college. Former editor Kyle Pope said Kushner ordered the paper to run “hit jobs” on people he felt had wronged him or his family. and Pope said the Observer failed to thrive on Kushner’s watch. becoming “a Potemkin village” of clickbait by the mid-2010s.
His real-estate record includes a major failure that critics have repeatedly cited as a warning sign about risk and judgment. In 2007, Kushner Companies, with Jared at the helm, purchased the 39-story, glass-and-steel office tower at 666 Fifth Avenue for nearly $2 billion. That represented a staggering markup from its $518 million sale price seven years prior. The family invested $50 million and borrowed $1.75 billion. After the subprime mortgage crisis, vacancy rates spiked as interest accumulated on the family’s 10-figure debt. The New York Times called it a “classic example of reckless underwriting.” To cover costs. Jared sold off nearly half of the family’s stake in the building’s retail space and later had to restructure the loan.
Even as Trump ran for president in 2016, the family was still scrambling for funding.
Around that same period, Kushner’s access to foreign rulers started intersecting with his family’s financial needs. Kushner and Charles solicited a personal investment from former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani—who had previously overseen Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. The sheikh. who goes by HBJ. agreed to put up $500 million to help refinance 666 Fifth Avenue if the family could raise the rest elsewhere. Negotiations stretched into 2017, as Kushner was charged with brokering Middle East peace. After controversy involving other potential investors. HBJ pulled out and Charles went directly to Qatar’s finance minister to seek an investment from Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund. but he failed to land a deal.
Two months later, in June 2017, a regional blockade of Qatar began. The Saudis. Emiratis. and other Middle East regimes severed ties with Doha as part of Gulf rivalry between US partners. and a potential invasion was described as looming. Yet the Trump administration, critics say, did not play arbiter. Investigative journalist Vicky Ward reported that the Trump administration immediately threw its weight behind the Saudis and Emiratis—and that Kushner. Ward wrote. “greenlit” the operation. Ward also wrote that an aide to then–Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told her: “The Saudis would not have risked moving forward without permission from somebody. ” and that the aide said: “That person must have been Jared.”.
While there was no direct evidence tying the blockade to Kushner’s investments. critics say the financial entanglements raised questions about motivation. Ward wrote that Kushner had “reamed the Qatari ruling family for not doing the deal” on 666 Fifth Avenue and asked whether the Qataris would see US support of Saudi Arabia and the UAE as Kushner saying. “If you don’t pay my father. the Americans are going to sanction an invasion of your country.”.
A turning point arrived in April 2018 after Qatari lobbying culminated in meetings between Trump and the emir. In May 2018. the New York Times reported that Charles Kushner was in “advanced talks” about 666 Fifth Avenue with a company partly owned by Qatar. Jared then flew to Doha. where he met with the emir to discuss “increasing cooperation.” Early that August. Kushner Companies inked a deal with the Qatar-backed company. eliminating what the New York Times called “the family’s biggest financial headache.” Pompeo pushed for a resolution in the meantime. and just before Trump left office. the Saudis and Qataris reached a deal to end the blockade.
Those involved denied any connection between the blockade deal and Kushner’s White House role—but critics say the timing made the separation of public and private interests dissolve.
The relationship with Saudi Arabia became even more direct in Kushner’s second stint in public service. Kushner’s friendship with MBS included texting sessions and Riyadh trips for unannounced talks. The New York Times wrote that the Saudi regime “cultivated the relationship with Mr. Kushner. ” seeing him as someone with “scant knowledge about” the Middle East and. specifically. “ignorance of Saudi Arabia.” The report said MBS even bragged he had Kushner “in his pocket.”.
US intelligence officials grew alarmed. warning of potential foreign influence and saying Kushner could be manipulated through his business arrangements and lack of experience. NBC reported that Kushner’s application for top-secret clearance was initially rejected over concerns “about potential foreign influence. ” before Trump overruled intelligence officials.
Other regimes were said to have studied the Saudi approach. A year into Trump’s first term. US intelligence analysts reported that officials from a range of foreign countries had “privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner” by exploiting his complex business arrangements. financial difficulties. and lack of foreign policy experience.
Israel was one such country. Kushner and his family supported what critics describe as Israeli imperialism in the Palestinian territories. helping bankroll settler organizations in the West Bank. Kushner also had a decades-long personal relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dating to the 1990s. when Charles Kushner supported Netanyahu’s rise and invited him to their New Jersey home. Bernstein wrote that young Jared even gave up his bedroom to Netanyahu and played basketball with him in the driveway. and critics say Netanyahu benefited from the access Kushner brought while in the White House. including brokering the Abraham Accords that sidestepped Palestinians. Al Jazeera and others cited normalization as a key factor in Hamas’ October 7 attacks and in the retaliatory razing of Gaza.
Russia, too, became a target of influence. After Trump was sworn in, Kushner became a Kremlin target second only to Trump himself. Federal documents show that President Vladimir Putin tasked Kirill Dmitriev. who is sanctioned by the US in 2022 along with his sovereign wealth fund. with courting top White House officials and Dmitriev focused on Kushner. Novaya Gazeta reported that it was with Kushner that Dmitriev established the closest and most trusting relationship. Dmitriev’s Russian role later intersected with Kushner’s second-term diplomacy. critics say. as Dmitriev and Kushner’s ties came full circle.
In that framing. Kushner is now said to be steeped in pro-Kremlin talking points as negotiations over ending the fighting in Ukraine move on Russia’s terms. The Kremlin is described as dangling potential deals worth “trillions of dollars” to US investors if sanctions are lifted. Kushner’s involvement includes publicly promoting a “peace plan” for Ukraine in late 2025 alongside Witkoff. The account says the plan’s provisions—capping Ukraine’s military and forcing Kyiv to cede territory Russia had not even conquered—are pro-Moscow. The Insider reported that the plan’s controversial conditions were contained in a months-old Kremlin document and that the plan was “at its core a recycled Russian document. ” with language that appeared almost word-for-word in an earlier text drafted solely by Dmitriev.
Israel’s connections were described as deepening as well. Trump reappointed Kushner and Witkoff became a key interlocutor for the administration’s Palestinian efforts. Critics say it was left unacknowledged that Affinity Partners had secured financial deals in Israel and was positioned to profit from the ongoing theft of Palestinian lands. In 2025. the Israelis approved Affinity’s purchase of nearly 10 percent of Phoenix Financial Ltd. making Kushner’s fund the largest shareholder. Phoenix is described as a “bulwark” for expansion in Palestinian territories and Syria, enabling building and construction.
On September 16, 2025, a UN commission declared Israel’s actions in Gaza a genocide. That same day, Forbes declared Kushner a billionaire.
At the end of the story, the central contradiction sits in plain sight: Kushner is a special peace envoy, but his financial universe is tied to regimes whose interests—whether in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia, Israel, or Iran’s rivals—have helped fund his ascent.
The Iran negotiations are where the conflict sharpens further, in the account. Kushner’s involvement in negotiations with Iran is described as another strategic failure. in part because Affinity’s money ties to Iran’s geopolitical rivals are “just as shocking” as the Israel conflict. and because critics argue he and Witkoff lacked the expertise and research needed for a sensitive nuclear track.
Kelsey Davenport. director of nonproliferation policy at the Arms Control Association. said it was “very surprised” the United States sent two negotiators who had done “almost no research into Iran’s negotiating history or even the basic facts surrounding the nuclear program.” Davenport said that while you don’t have to be a nuclear physicist. the team should be surrounded by nuclear experts.
An early March audio recording obtained by Mother Jones is described as showing Kushner complaining that Tehran wasn’t taking the US position seriously and was responding with “games and tricks and denials.” Davenport argued that Iran’s “response should not have been a surprise. ” saying Iran had been “burned” in the past on fuel supplies and views enrichment and fuel production as pride and a sovereign right. Davenport said Witkoff and Kushner “fundamentally misread the Iranian position.”.
The account says that despite this. mediators including the Omani foreign minister cited “substantial progress” and British mediators saw “no compelling evidence” of imminent nuclear threat. Kushner. however. is described as taking Netanyahu’s rhetoric. saying Iranians “basically could have been days or weeks away from a weapon” if they had put in the effort.
The political and human stakes—destabilizing the region. alienating allies. and bleeding Americans’ wallets—are described. including a figure that the US has spent “nearly $50 billion” in military resources. The account includes a quote from Jonathan Guyer. program director at Eurasia Group’s Institute for Global Affairs. saying that reporting suggests “a strong deal was on offer had there been the patience and expertise from the US negotiating team. ” and that Kushner was not interested in the patience and effort needed.
In the midst of that violence, Kushner’s investment posture continued. The New York Times reported in March that even as US bombs rained down on Tehran. Kushner was meeting with foreign regimes. including the Saudis. to raise additional billions for Affinity. It said other Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds that had invested earlier—including those in the UAE and Qatar—were expected to be asked for more.
Back in Washington, once Kushner had the official title of special peace envoy, the law required a financial disclosure. The account says he hasn’t produced it. and that a Republican-controlled Congress doesn’t seem inclined to haul him in. That could change if Democrats retake either chamber in the midterms.
Democratic Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff asked a crowd in a clip posted on TikTok in mid-April: “Can you imagine. like. a normal. sitting US ambassador just hitting up Saudi grand Prince Mohammed bin Salman for billions of dollars?” A man yelled “No!” and Ossoff responded: “But he’s a Trump!. A royal. A princeling!”.
Investigations are also on the books in the account. This past spring, Raskin, along with Wyden and Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), announced separate committee investigations into Kushner’s conflicts of interest. Wyden said in a press release that Kushner “makes up for his flaws as an investor by being a wildly corrupt appendage of his father-in-law’s wildly corrupt administration. ” adding that Kushner is “literally on the payroll of the Saudi government and trying to take even more of their money while simultaneously hijacking US foreign policy with his shadow State Department.”.
The account concludes that Kushner may not be directly responsible for the Iran war—thousands of deaths. billions in damages. shortages of fuel and fertilizer and key metals. economic disruption. and the nearly $50 billion in US military resources are described as Trump’s call—but that Kushner’s leading role in the negotiations makes him complicit in what is described as a costly and humiliating defeat.
It returns to the central theme: rules. restrictions. and conflicts of interest—at least in this telling—didn’t slow the project of converting access into profit. As the wars in Ukraine and Gaza remain unresolved. and as Israel’s actions in Gaza were labeled a genocide by a UN commission on September 16. 2025. Kushner’s wealth was celebrated the same day. with Forbes declaring him a billionaire.
For critics, the message is grimly simple: the “deal guy” who helped monetize foreign relations helped define the diplomacy. And the world’s crises kept moving while the fund kept feeding.
Jared Kushner Affinity Partners Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman Foreign Agents Registration Act Steve Witkoff Board of Peace Iran negotiations Ukraine peace plan Phoenix Financial Ltd. Qatar United Arab Emirates Merrick Garland