While working on our exclusive about Jared Kushner’s latest amendments to his financial disclosure forms, I got a first-hand look at just exactly how tangled and complicated Kushner’s assets are.
I went through just a tiny sliver of the financial documents associated with a handful of his holdings, and to say they’re convoluted is an understatement. It’s also true that Kushner, like the rest of Trump-world, was caught wholly unprepared for his father-in-law’s election win, and was flying by the seat of his pants for much of the first few months after the election.
But it’s also been more than a year since Kushner became a top White House official, and nearly a year since he filed his personal financial disclosure, so it’s unclear why his team still hasn’t been able to get this right—especially given the high level of scrutiny his finances continue to face.
It’s also highly unlikely that the blame for Kushner’s many updates to his disclosure forms lies with his attorneys. He’s been represented by the white-shoe law firm WilmerHale since the start, and added powerhouse criminal defense attorney Abbe Lowell and his firm Norton Rose Fulbright last summer.
“I know he’s well represented, I just have to believe his representatives didn’t have all the information they needed up front, or even six months,” former Office of Government Ethics head Don Fox told me.
But as Fox pointed out, “The information is only as good as the client is producing.”
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