Donald Trump Son-in-Law Jared Kushner Could Face His Own Conflict-of-Interest Questions

[mahatmakanejeeves]

Last edited Tue Nov 29, 2016, 01:33 PM - Edit history (1)

Pay per view. I'll post more at lunch.

ETA, at lunch: if you access the article from Google the paywall isn't there.

This is analysis, not news.

Hat tip, Alex Roarty, for retweeting Susan Davis's tweet. Susan Davis gets a hat tip too, for tweeting in the first place.

There's a belief that the flag-burning tweetstorm is supposed to be a distraction from this story. It didn't work.

I don't know how to make tweets appear as images.

https://twitter.com/DaviSusan/status/803600777755426817

Trump tweeted this around time WSJ posted this story re: Jared Kushner's potential conflicts. Read it instead:

Donald Trump Son-in-Law Jared Kushner Could Face His Own Conflict-of-Interest Questions

Even as an unpaid adviser, Mr. Kushner’s financing arrangements for his real-estate firm could draw scrutiny

By Peter Grant

[e-mail]
https://twitter.com/PeterGrantwsj

Updated Nov. 29, 2016 6:49 a.m. ET

The real-estate company controlled by Jared Kushner, President-elect Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has hundreds of millions of dollars in loans outstanding from domestic and foreign financial institutions, markets condominiums to wealthy U.S. and foreign buyers and has obtained development financing through a controversial U.S. program that sells green cards.

Those and other business activities could raise conflict-of-interest issues if Mr. Kushner is named to a staff position in the Trump administration. Executive branch employees are prohibited from participating in any matter in which there is “a close causal link” between that matter and a “real possibility” of a financial gain or loss, according to the U.S. Office of Government Ethics.

Mr. Trump has floated the idea of Mr. Kushner taking a number of roles in his administration. But he also is considering not giving Mr. Kushner any staff position to sidestep the conflict issue, a person familiar with his thinking said Monday. ... If Mr. Trump wanted to give Mr. Kushner an official role he also would have to comply with federal nepotism law. Even if Mr. Kushner were to serve in the new administration as an unpaid adviser, his potential influence on policy would invite scrutiny, legal experts said.
....

Another potential conflict comes from Mr. Kushner’s participation in the federal EB-5 program, which allows wealthy foreign investors to obtain U.S. green cards. His company used the program to finance its Trump Bay Street rental tower that just opened in Jersey City. The $200 million project has a licensing deal with the Trump Organization to use the Trump name.

When I edited the post at 12:12 p.m., I made sure to add the part about the EB-5 program. I saw that the first and so far only person to reply discussed it.

[think]

1. "Trump's Jersey City Tower Built With Cash From Green Card-Seeking Chinese Millionaires"

Trump's Jersey City Tower Built With Cash From Green Card-Seeking Chinese Millionaires

BY NATHAN TEMPEY IN NEWS ON MAR 7, 2016 11:32 AM

Donald "we're going to beat China" Trump, who has pledged to impose yuge tariffs on goods from the Asian country if elected president, has no problem helping wealthy Chinese people get visas to come to the U.S. to help finance a New Jersey tower with his name on it. Bloomberg reports that Trump Bay Street, a 50-story luxury rental complex in Jersey City, is being built by Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner using tens of millions of dollars in money from the controversial EB-5 visa program, which offers investors who provide a minimum of $500,000 in financing a two-year visa and a shot at permanent residency in the United States for them and their families.

The program brings about 10,000 foreign millionaires to the U.S. a year on visas, about 85 of them from China, and has been used to help finance the Atlantic Yards and Hudson Yards mega-developments, among other big-ticket New York-area projects.

The hypocrisy of this for Trump is obvious. Bloomberg reports:

"They've taken our jobs, they've taken our money, they've taken everything," [Trump] said of China in a speech late last month. He has called for a revamping, even a freezing, of the immigration system, but says he would make an exception for the highly-skilled.

Yet no skills are required of the wealthy Chinese being courted by a Chinese-subtitled video to help finance a huge Trump-branded tower in New Jersey. The video leads viewers behind the wheel of a car into Jersey City with scenes of the tower, all to the tune of the theme song from The Sopranos, "Woke Up This Morning."

...

Read more:
http://gothamist.com/2016/03/07/more_trump_hypocrisy.php

More about the EB-5 Visa program:

Should Congress Let Wealthy Foreigners Buy Green Cards?

ALANA SEMUELS SEP 21, 2015

The massive $20 billion Hudson Yards project is one of the nation’s biggest development efforts. When it’s completed on New York’s west side, it will have have 5,000 apartments, six skyscrapers, and pneumatic tubes for trash disposal. And one more feature of the project: It has paved the way for the green cards of about 1,200 Chinese millionaires.

How’s that? Via what’s known as the EB-5 “Immigrant Investor” program, which allows foreigners to get a green card if they invest a certain amount of money to create jobs in the United States. In effect, rich people can buy American citizenship, and that’s made it controversial in an era of wariness about immigration.

~Snip~

But with the sudden influx of money from China and elsewhere, the government could not keep up, and regulation lagged behind. Some of the most salacious scandals have concerned swindlers defrauding potential investors, and visas going to people with criminal histories, all beneath regulators’ noses.

One of the biggest problems, experts say, is that investors can put money into projects like Hudson Yards and earn a green card without actually creating very many jobs, at least not directly. That’s largely because of the way the EB-5 program has been changed since its inception....

Read more:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/09/should-congress-let-wealthy-foreigners-buy-citizenship/406432/