Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, has held onto about 90 percent of his real estate investments even as he serves as a top White House adviser, according to a Washington Post analysis of his financial disclosure form published Sunday.
It’s unclear whether any of the 124 assets maintained by Kushner stand to pose conflicts of interest with his work in the White House, and the Trump administration declined to share Kushner’s ethics agreement with the Washington Post.
Jamie Gorelick, an attorney for Kushner, told the newspaper that Kushner and his team were “striving for simplicity” in choosing which assets to sell off.
“Jared takes the ethics rules very seriously and would never compromise himself or the administration,” Joshua Raffel, a spokesman for Kushner, told the Post.
Representatives for Kushner also told the newspaper that the White House adviser plans to file an updated financial disclosure form to make corrections and fill in omissions.
Kushner recently came under scrutiny after his sister, Nicole Kushner Meyer, mentioned him while pitching a project to potential investors in China. Meyer was looking for investors in a new Kushner Companies real estate development in New Jersey, One Journal Square. She was pitching specifically to investors through the EB-5 visa program, which gives foreign nationals who invest $500,000 or more in a project that creates jobs in the United States a path to a green card.
Meyer apologized for mentioning her brother, and the White House issued a statement at the time noting that Kushner had sold his stake in that particular real estate project. The White House also said that he would not work with issues related to the EB-5 program.
“Mr. Kushner divested his interests in the One Journal Square project by selling them to a family trust that he is not a beneficiary of, a mechanism suggested by the Office of Government Ethics,” Blake Roberts, an attorney for Kushner, said in a statement earlier in May. As previously stated, he will recuse from particular matters concerning the EB-5 visa program.”
The Washington Post noted that while Kushner divested from One Journal Square, he held onto his stake in a project across the street called 30 Journal Square.
“30 Journal Square is a separate project that did not pose the same complexities, including EB-5 financing, as One Journal Square,” Kushner’s lawyers said in a statement to the Post when asked why Kushner maintained his stake in one project but not the other.
Read the full analysis at the Washington Post.
