Jared Kushner Is Making Bank Off of Iran Negotiations

Donald Trump’s son-in-law has fundraised billions of dollars for his investment fund

President Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who serves as a special envoy for peace in the Trump administration, has made billions of dollars for his investment firm from donors in the Middle East at the same time.

The New Yorker reports that during peace negotiations with Iran earlier this year, Kushner managed to raise $5 billion for his group Affinity Partners. When the U.S.’s attacks on Iran restarted in [month?], some observers became suspicious that Kushner’s business activities were linked to his work for the Trump administration.

“My sense is that he thinks he was killing two birds with one stone—he was helping the Arabs defeat the Iranians, and he wanted to be paid for it,” an unnamed American source with extensive ties to leaders in the Middle East told the magazine.

With the U.S. left with no good options as Iran maintains control of the Strait of Hormuz, Kushner and Trump’s other special envoy Steve Witkoff haven’t been active in peace talks. The latest round of negotiations over the summer were led by Vice President JD Vance. The leaders of Arab Gulf states are reportedly disappointed in Kushner for failing to end the war.

“They were investing money in him. They thought that would bring them some influence that would protect them, and it did the opposite,” a former senior U.S. official told The New Yorker. “Their whole business model was stability. And now it’s gone.”

Kushner’s firm was built off of investments in and from the Middle East. Using money from Saudi Arabia, Affinity put $110 million into the car-leasing Shlomo Group, and nearly $300 million into Phoenix Financial, an insurance company. Both are Israeli companies, according to The New Yorker.

All of this raises massive conflict of interest concerns. When Kushner jets off to Pakistan or Qatar, is he seeking the best outcomes for the American people or his investment firm?

Are Israel and the Gulf states trying to coerce him into specific outcomes by dangling lucrative business deals?

Kushner has already caused upheaval in Albania thanks to his real estate project there. What if he puts the U.S. at risk trying to make a buck in the Middle East amidst a quagmire with Iran?

Trump’s Voter Fraud Quest Is Turning Illegal, Whistleblower Says

Investigators are illegally accessing state voter rolls—and likely flagging U.S. citizens as “unlawful voters” in a rushed attempt to meet their quotas, a whistleblower warns.

A whistleblower has alleged that federal investigators violated state law in a desperate attempt to find proof of President Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud. 

Agents at the Department of Homeland Security have been posing as voters, entering people’s personal voting information (like Social Security number and date of birth) into public-facing state websites, and using that to determine if they are eligible to vote or note—all in about 12 minutes thanks to their 40-person-a-day quota.

Many states have laws indicating that only the actual person voting may input their own information into said public-facing sites, making the agents’ actions potentially illegal. 

These questionable tactics make the  “Unlawful Voter Initiative” launched by Trump two weeks ago an extremely tenuous endeavor.

In the report, compiled by the government watchdog group the Democracy Defenders Fund, the whistleblower also alleges that the agents’ rushed data collections may be rife with inaccuracies.

The “alien identification numbers” of people who entered the U.S. as noncitizens are still listed on their records—even if they became a full citizen years ago. The hasty nature of DHS’s efforts may result in people who are well within their right to vote as citizens are flagged as “unlawful voters.”

The report also notes that some of the agents themselves began to grow concerned about using people’s personal data, and hesitated to identify individuals as unlawful  voters.

DHS in a statement argued that it is well within its rights to peruse the intimate voter data of millions of Americans because “It’s not rocket science; it’s an easy step to secure our elections.”

“I do think the American people value keeping their personal information private,” said Senator Alex Padilla, whom the report was delivered to on Sunday.

“The other thing that’s concerning here, that the American people who would be offended by, is the knowing inaccuracy of what they’re doing, whether it’s the data or their sham analysis. It’s going to produce false positives.”