Jared Kushner didn’t disclose his business ties with George Soros, Peter Thiel, and Goldman Sachs, or that he owes $1 billion in loans, The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday.
The top White House adviser and son-in-law of Trump failed to identify his part ownership of Cadre, a real-estate startup he founded, which links him to the Goldman Sachs Group and the mega-investors George Soros and Peter Thiel, sources told The Journal.
Business Insider first reported on Kushner’s involvement with Cadre last June. Here’s more about what Cadre is.
Jamie Gorelick, an attorney for Kushner, told The Journal in a statement that Cadre was part of BFPS Ventures LLC, a company Kushner owns and identified in his government financial-disclosure forms.
Gorelick also said a revised version of Kushner's form that includes Cadre would be made available once ethics officials have looked at it.
Kushner also failed to identify debt of more than $1 billion from 20 lenders and personal guarantees to pay more than $300 million of that, according to The Journal.
While Gorelick called revisions to the disclosure "very normal," ethics experts told The Journal that the loans and guarantees should be disclosed so officials could decide whether Kushner needs to recuse himself from issues that involve his lenders. Investment in startups like Cadre should definitely be disclosed, experts said.
"Anything that presents a potential for the conflict of interest should be disclosed so that the public and the press can monitor this," Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, told The Journal.
A source told The Journal that Kushner planned to recuse himself from anything that concerned Deutsche Bank or RBS, two lenders that have given him money for his properties or companies and to which he has provided personal guarantees on loans.
He still owes money to Bank of America, Blackstone Group, Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, and RBS, all of which were not disclosed, according to The Journal.
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