Trump and Kushner’s cozy relationship with the Saudis is the real corruption scandal
Last week featured the first of what promises to be many public hearings about President Biden’s son Hunter, whom the new GOP House majority vows to investigate for the next two years. Going after what they all now casually call “The Biden Crime Family” is their number one priority.
That first hearing was about a now infamous New York Post story about the exceedingly weird “discovery” of Hunter Biden’s laptop that Twitter initially suppressed only to allow back on the website just 24 hours later. This incident has become evidence, if you want to call it that, that proves Twitter was working on behalf of the Biden campaign and its alleged allies in the woke FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) to cover up the Bidens’ corruption.
That hearing fizzled out, however, when it was pointed out that virtually everyone in politics, most especially Trump and his administration, were constantly asking Twitter to remove tweets they didn’t want widely seen. In the case of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Twitter made the decision itself. As it happened, the Biden campaign did seek to keep the nude pictures of Hunter which had been found on the laptop off the website, just as Trump had requested that Twitter remove a tweet from Chrissy Teigen in which the model called Trump a “p*ssy *ss b**ch.”
One of the goals of the GOP is to get Joe Biden to break down emotionally over Hunter Biden’s laptop.
But this was just the opening salvo.
The committee plans to throw up a smoke screen on this Hunter Biden pseudo-scandal so thick that the public will eventually believe there must be something to it even though they have no idea what it’s really all about. This is a patented GOP tactic that they honed to perfection with Bill and Hillary Clinton over many years and which contributed mightily to the “email” scandal that brought her down in 2016. They will never stop pushing this as long as Joe Biden is in office. As I have mentioned before, because they know that Biden is extraordinarily sentimental about his children and they see him as a doddering old fool, I think one of the goals of the GOP is to get Joe Biden to break down emotionally over Hunter Biden’s laptop.
None of this is to say that Hunter Biden didn’t engage in a series of business deals that created the appearance of a conflict of interest, some of which coincided in some cases with his well-documented history of substance use disorder. As the New York Times reported in this thorough investigation of the whole story, it’s clear that he made quite a bit of money mainly trading on his famous father’s name. But there is no evidence that Joe Biden was involved in any of Hunter’s business dealings and, in fact, behaved in some ways that conflicted with Hunter’s financial interests.
As the Times reported, a prosecutor who was named by Donald Trump has been looking into Hunter’s business dealings and apparently homed in on two criminal violations, both of which took place while Hunter was grappling with his drug addiction. One is for failure to file tax returns in two years (he has subsequently paid the tax owed) and lying on a form to purchase a gun by saying he didn’t use drugs when he did. The Senate Oversight Committee looked into all this and reported that there is no there, there as well.
On the other hand, if you want to see an example of the kind of corruption Republicans are implying that Biden and his son engaged in, you need to look no further than Donald Trump and Jared Kushner.
Keeping in mind that Trump never divested his business and openly encouraged foreign interests to curry favor by spending vast sums at his hotels and resorts while he was president, the latest revelations about how he and Kushner sold out American interests to Saudi Arabia are truly shocking. Trump certainely made millions as president, but the deals he and Kushner struck for the post-presidency were massively lucrative. The Washington Post dropped a new story on Kushner’s relationship with the Saudi crown prince this past weekend that sheds new light on how he and his father-in-law cashed in. The article lays out how both these men were in financial binds as they left the White House due to some bad deals and Trump’s brand being severely tarnished:
The day after leaving the White House, Kushner created a company that he transformed months later into a private equity firm with $2 billion from a sovereign wealth fund chaired by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Kushner’s firm structured those funds in such a way that it did not have to disclose the source, according to previously unreported details of Securities and Exchange Commission forms reviewed by The Washington Post. His business used a commonly employed strategy that allows many equity firms to avoid transparency about funding sources, experts said.
A year after his presidency, Trump’s golf courses began hosting tournaments for the Saudi fund-backed LIV Golf. Separately, the former president’s family company, the Trump Organization,secured an agreement with a Saudi real estate company that plans to build a Trump hotel as part of a $4 billion golf resort in Oman.
The substantial investments by the Saudis in enterprises that benefited both mencame after they cultivated close ties with Mohammed while Trump was in office — helping the crown prince’s standing by scheduling Trump’s first presidential trip to Saudi Arabia, backing him amid numerous international crises and meeting with him repeatedly in D.C. and the kingdom, including on a finaltrip Kushner took to Saudi Arabia on the eve of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack.
The article traces Kushner’s push for a ‘special relationship” with Saudi Arabia to the earliest days of the presidency and shows how he worked it assiduously throughout the term, up until the very final days. The quid pro quos are laid out in the story but frankly, we don’t know how much information Kushner was sharing on his private line to the crown prince over the years. There was certainly plenty of suspicion about that — recall that Trump had to personally order that Kushner be given a top security clearance.
We are talking about billion-dollar agreements here, not some penny-ante deals from five years ago that were never consummated, as in the Biden case. And this is still happening as we speak — while Trump is running for president again.
The Chairman of the House Oversight Committee appeared on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” and was asked about all of this:
Kushner has never answered any questions about this $2 billion Saudi deal with any authority, whether legal or congressional. Trump hasn’t answered any questions about the LIV golf agreement with Saudi Arabia either and what they both did goes far beyond “influence peddling.” There is ample evidence that Trump and Kushner both sold out their country’s interests for personal gain. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there aren’t any nude pictures or emails involved — so I’d guess the American people probably aren’t going to hear much about it.