Charles Kushner, White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s father, is trying to take the fall for the family’s calamitous investment in 666 Fifth Avenue to shift blame from his son, according to a CNN report Tuesday morning.
“I pushed Jared to do the deal,” Charles Kushner told CNN, adding that the deal was “bad timing and bad judgment.”
Kushner Companies paid $1.8 billion in 2007 for the skyscraper, a bet that backfired when a crashing market left the property saddled with $1.2 billion in debt. Attempts to recruit foreign investors to salvage the purchase have come back to haunt Jared Kushner, when stories of his meetings linked to the Chinese government leaked while he was working as a foreign affairs liaison on his father-in-law’s transition team.
In the interview with CNN, Charles Kushner alluded to a deal in the works currently to recruit above-the-board investors and mitigate the financial burdens. His attempt to take the blame for his son points to the criticism surrounding the younger Kushner over what some see as a failure to properly divest from his business interests while working in a senior capacity in the Trump administration.
